Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 64176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 321(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 214(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 321(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 214(@300wpm)
“Look at me.”
Her ragged breathing is the only response I get as I watch shock morph into panic and fear in her eyes.
“I said fucking look at me.” I tug her closer, squeezing my hand around her arm.
She makes a sound that makes me think of a cornered animal, something small and helpless.
Cristina is that animal. There hasn’t been a moment since the accident that she wasn’t that.
She meets my eyes, and what she sees in them has her trying to pull back.
“Look what you did. To me. To yourself.” The cut to her throat, though, it’s shallow.
“I…I…”
“Move.”
I don’t release her as I turn her toward the stairs. She resists, and fuck, my hand fucking hurts like fucking hell, but I keep moving her. I need to get her to her room. Lock her inside it before I do something rash.
“Let me go!” Her shock wears off, and the fight is back as she stumbles. We’re moving too fast up the stairs, and she can’t keep up. I have to haul her upright more than once. “Let me go. Let me fucking go!”
“Stop fighting me before you send us both down the stairs!”
“I’ll send you to hell where you fucking belong!”
She manages to twist free as we enter the narrower hallways and runs, but it’s darker here, and she doesn’t know her way, and a few moments later, I hear her steps slow.
“Come back here,” I stalk, following more slowly as she runs.
“Stay away from me!”
She stops when the hallway splits, giving her two options, one a dimly lit staircase up, the other a dark corridor.
She chooses the stairs. Good girl.
I don’t run after her. I don’t need to.
By the time we get to the top of the stairs, she’s fallen twice, and she stops again, looking at her options, three narrower corridors, all dark.
“Cristina.”
“Stay away!”
She chooses, and I hear her heels clicking as she runs.
She’s going the wrong way. Down the corridor that will lead to the west wing of the house. Toward Lucas’s rooms.
I need to get a bandage around my hand. I’m leaving a trail of blood as I walk.
“Come back here and I’ll take it easy on you.” I won’t. I open a door and slip inside, moving through the connecting rooms to head her off at the end of the path.
“You stay the hell away from me, Damian!”
I step out into the ever-darkening corridor. Her steps have slowed, and I remember what she told me when she was little. And I know that she’s still afraid of the dark.
I don’t speak. I barely breathe as I listen for her.
She stops altogether about a dozen feet from me, but she can’t see me. It’s pitch-black where I am. She’s panting and out of breath.
“Shit.” It’s a whisper, but I hear it. She takes a step, then another. Stops, changes direction, feeling her way back toward the little bit of light that comes from the mouth of the corridor.
I step silently out into the hallway and from here, I can smell her fear.
“Damian?” she asks into the darkness when I’m only two steps behind her, and I’m surprised. I think that her calling for me is the biggest surprise of the evening.
“Boo!”
She screams as I clamp my arm around her middle, lift her off her feet and toss her over my shoulder to carry her through the darkness back toward the light, to the other passage she should have chosen, up the winding staircase and finally into her room.
I drop her on the bed.
She bounces twice, face wet from tears. I’m not sure if it’s her blood or mine that stains her throat and face, her dress. The wine she spilled has dried into a deep, dark mauve, so much like blood, too.
She sits up, ready for more, ready to claw and scratch.
I capture her wrists, straddle her, pinning her arms over her head as she twists and turns.
“You fucking bastard! Let me go!”
“Stop fighting me, Cristina!” My hand throbs. It bleeds onto her wrist as the pain intensifies.
She twists once more, and I squeeze, biting back the pain as she presses herself into the bed as if she can put space between us.
I snort. Doesn’t she know there’s no escaping me? Her gaze shifts between her pinned wrists and me. I take a breath in to steady myself and manage the pain. I need to get out of here. Get away from her before I retaliate.
“You need to learn to do as you’re told before you get hurt,” I say, trying to level my voice but failing.
I drag her arms over her head and hold them with one hand while reaching between the mattress and the headboard to find the cuffs there. I installed them months before her arrival.
One by one, I secure her wrists over her head, then stand.