Two
DOREN
She was magnificent when she was angry.
I’d known she would be. I’d watched her long enough to recognize the fire underneath her composed exterior—the way her eyes flared when someone talked down to her, the set of her jaw when she was preparing to argue.
But seeing it directed at me, all that fury and fear and desperate courage, was better than I’d imagined.
“Going to what?” I didn’t rise from the chair.
I didn’t need to. “Run? We’re at least an hour from the nearest town, there’s no public transportation and your mobile has no signal.
The doors are locked with a code you don’t have.
Even if you got outside, the woods go on for kilometers in every direction. ”
I watched the reality of her situation sink in. Her face paled, then flushed with renewed anger. Her fists clenched.
“People will look for me.”
“Will they?” I tilted my head, studying her.
“Your parents live in Cornwall and you haven’t visited in eight months.
Your sister is traveling in Southeast Asia with a boyfriend you don’t approve of.
Your colleagues at the bureau are friendly but not close—you keep everyone at arm’s length.
The man you were seeing ended things two months ago, and you haven’t tried to reach out since. ”
Her breath caught. “How do you—”
“I told you. I’ve been watching.” I let that land, let her understand the scope of what I was telling her. “No one will notice you’re missing for at least a week. Possibly two. By then…”
“By then what?”
I smiled. It wasn’t kind. “By then, you won’t want to leave.”
—Lillet—
He was wrong.
He had to be.
I spent the first day searching for weaknesses in what I’d come to think of as my prison.
The cottage was small but well-appointed—the bedroom where I’d woken, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, a main room with a fireplace and kitchen area, and a second bedroom that appeared to be his.
The windows were fitted with locks I couldn’t pick.
The doors were reinforced steel behind their wooden facades.
The wardrobe in my room was stocked with clothes in my size—soft sweaters, jeans, even bras and knickers. All exactly what I would have chosen for myself. The realization that he knew me well enough to predict my preferences turned my stomach.
He’d planned this. Whatever sick fantasy was playing out in his head, he’d prepared for it.
He gave me space that first day. Brought me food—homemade, which added to the overall creepiness. When I looked at it warily, he picked up one of two forks on the tray my meal sat on, and took a big bite.
“I won’t drug you,” he said before leaving me alone to eat.
I hated that I believed him. That some small, traitorous part of me had noticed how he’d eaten first without being asked—as if anticipating my fear and addressing it before I had to voice it. A kidnapper with manners. How very civilized.
I wanted him to slip. To show me what he really was so I could stop noticing the rest. Instead, he answered my questions with maddening calm, never showing anything but endless, aggravating patience.
He hadn’t raised his voice once. He hadn’t threatened me or done any of the things I’d braced myself for.
If I stripped away the context—the locked doors, the isolation, the insane declaration that I belonged to him—his behavior had been gentlemanly.
That was the most disturbing part. It would be easier to hate someone who looked and acted the part of a monster
He said he worked in “security consulting,” which I suspected was a euphemism, that he served in the military—he didn’t say which branch—and that he had no intention of hurting me.
“Then let me go,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time.
“No.”
“Why?”
He’d looked at me as if the answer was so obvious he couldn’t understand why I’d asked.
“Because you’re mine,” he said. “And I don’t let go of what’s mine.”
By the third day, I’d stopped screaming.
It hadn’t helped. The cottage was too remote for anyone to hear, and all it did was make my throat raw and give him an excuse to bring me tea with honey, which I drank even though I’d sworn not to accept anything from him beyond basic sustenance.
I was adapting. God help me. Three days in captivity and the routine was already becoming familiar—meals at regular intervals, hours of reading from his surprisingly well-stocked shelves, evenings spent in tense silence while he watched me from across the room.
Besides the occasional brush of fingers when he handed me something, he hadn’t touched me since the first day. That was the part I couldn’t understand. He’d told me I belonged to him, looked at me with naked hunger more than once, yet he kept his distance.
On the third night, I broke.
“Why haven’t you—” I stopped, not sure how to finish the sentence. Or even if I wanted to.
Snow looked up from the book he’d been reading. His pale eyes found mine with an unnerving intensity that I’d come to expect.
“Haven’t I what?”
“You know what.” My face burned, but I forced myself to continue. “You brought me here. You told me I belong to you. But you haven’t tried to…”
“Touch you?”
My heart was beating too fast as I waited for him to respond.
“You think I brought you here to force myself on you.” He set his book down.
“What else am I supposed to think?”
He rose from his chair and stepped closer.
“I’m not interested in taking something you don’t want to give.
” His tone dropped. “When I touch you—and I will touch you, Lillet, make no mistake about that—it will be because you ask me to. Because you’re desperate for it.
Because your desire is so powerful, you can’t think about anything else. ”
I raised my chin. “That's never going to happen.”
“We’ll see.”
His arrogance should have made me laugh. Did he think every woman he met eventually fell at his feet? Did that smug certainty work on everyone?
Yet there was something in his eyes that wasn’t smug at all. It was as though he’d studied me specifically—not women in general, but me—and drawn his conclusions from evidence I hadn’t realized I was providing.
He held my gaze for several seconds, then turned, walked into his bedroom, and shut the door.
I clenched my fists to stop trembling, and not from fear.
He wasn’t wrong about my desire. That was the horrifying truth I couldn’t escape.
I’d spent the time I’d been here watching him—the grace of his movements, the way his forearms flexed when he cooked, the glimpse of ink disappearing beneath his collar that made me wonder what other secrets his body held.
He was beautiful in a way that felt dangerous, like standing too close to a cliff’s edge.