Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Eventually, my body succumbed, the exertion of the run, the adrenaline and the scant amount of food I’d consumed exhausting me. I woke early again, donning running clothes. Knox didn’t chase me that time.
Which was good, I reminded myself.
I especially reminded myself that the little urge inside of me didn’t exist. The urge that wanted to be chased, wanted that fear and desire mixing inside of me, wanted to go back to yesterday, to the most alive I’d ever felt in my three decades walking the earth.
The plan was to talk to him as little as possible. Give him the silent treatment, be an overall bitch to him. I didn’t consider myself a bitch and didn’t think it was an okay thing to be—though too many women were labeled that way by men for merely being assertive and not fawning all over them—but I thought etiquette dictated that you could be a bitch to the man holding you hostage.
Again, that had been the plan. But I wasn’t practiced at being a bitch. So I kind of forgot my plan. I didn’t forget about my captivity, mind you. Just the vow I’d made to myself. I liked being alone, was happy with books, cooking, being in nature, meditating, reading Tarot, tending to my small herb garden on our rooftop.
But it was hard to do a lot of those things in a small, one-room cabin with a statuesque man quietly emanating various degrees of menace.
It made me uneasy. And very scared.
But I didn’t want to show my fear. Something told me that he was used to that, Knox.
I assumed he had plenty of people submitting to his will, his commands, doing everything in their power to avoid him. And yes, ancient survival instincts and general common sense were telling me to keep as far away from him as possible and to keep our interactions to a bare minimum.
But there was something more than common sense, something borne out of my penchant for romance books and affinity for the villain as opposed to the hero. Beauty and the Beast was my favorite Disney movie, after all. I liked the beast, I liked that he could’ve ripped Belle apart at any moment. And aside from the fact that it would’ve made the movie a lot less child-friendly, it wouldn’t be as appealing to young girls.
We want to tame the beast. We want to know its talons could rip us apart, but instead, they stroke our skin. That their teeth could chew our flesh, but instead, their lips go to our most intimate and vulnerable of places…
“Here.” I kind of yelled the word as I placed a steaming mug of tea in front of Knox. In the short time we’d been in each other’s company, I’d noted that he drank it often. Not coffee—we didn’t have any coffee. Tea. An interesting choice for a man like him.
Tea, a delicate, mindful drink that required care, ritual. Or at least the way I drank it.
I’d likely put too much thought into it, since there wasn’t anything else to drink but tea. It could’ve been borne from necessity, nothing else.
He looked up from the book he’d been reading, the battered paperback so worn the title wasn’t legible. I’d tried to crane my head to find it in the interior, but I never got close enough to it—to him—and he didn’t leave it lying around.
It was likely How to Dismember and Dispose of a Body in Less Than Twenty Minutes.
He closed it as I got close, not marking where he’d left off. I didn’t see him look to memorize the page number either.
Interesting.
His entire form stiffened as I leaned close to place the tea in front of him.
“It’s not coffee.” I stepped back, circling my fingers around my own warm mug, inhaling the steam as it came out. “Obviously. You know that, since you didn’t buy coffee. If I didn’t already think so due to you working for Stone and kidnapping me and everything, I would’ve pegged you as a psychopath for that alone.”
It was an attempt at a dark joke. To break the tension between us. Why I thought that breaking the tension with my kidnapper was a good idea was anyone’s guess.
Knox, quite unsurprisingly, didn’t smile at that. It wasn’t funny. Especially because he likely was a psychopath.
Then again, weren’t psychopaths highly charismatic, able to blend in, act like humans?
Knox wasn’t trying to act as if he was anything but a stone-cold killer. He was going out of his way to communicate that.
I took a deep breath then sipped my tea, looking out at the woods. They always seemed to stare back. I knew that made a lot of people afraid of this portion of Northern America, but it had always comforted me. Being looked upon by something wild, unpredictable, ancient.