I let the conversation drift to less loaded topics, for my sake as well as for Jenna’s embarrassment. My cock has been hard all evening, but since she ate the cake? Damn. The lack of blood flow to other parts of my body is becoming an issue. I still have to keep to my vow that I’m not claiming a girl half my age who is my captive and has amnesia.
When all the food is consumed, the petit fours demolished, and the teapot nearly empty, we’re both relaxed at the table. I’ve undone the knot of my bow tie, leaving it to hang around my neck. Jenna’s hair has come loose from whatever pinned-up thing she had done, and it falls over her cheeks, framing it beautifully.
“How did we… When did you… Why?” She struggles to articulate her question, toying with a teaspoon, so I help out.
“It was Karik’s fault.”
She scoffs.
“True!” I insist. “I was out driving one night, a few months ago. Just before dawn.”
“Why?” There’s a suspicious tinge to her voice, but she leans forward, elbows onto the table, eager to hear more.
“No, not that. If I need people killed, they come to me. Voluntarily or not.”
Her mouth flattens with disapproval.
“I drive at night because I can’t sleep.”
“Guilty conscience from regular kidnapping of women?” She frowns, but I see the hint of jealousy.
“No. Not that either. I’ve never kidnapped any woman except you.” I could brush off her implied question, but for the first time in my life, I don’t. “Nothing I or my father before me did to build Rotherhithe causes me trouble. But I wake in the middle of the night with a heaviness I can’t shake.” I let the words come as she turns inch by inch until she’s looking straight at me. “I have done nothing but work for a long time. I fed my basest instincts with violence, but it all felt empty after a while.”
She blinks.
“I’m lonely,” I admit, more abruptly than I intend.
“And a dog makes you less alone? You got Karik.”
“Not the dog, no.” I wonder if she’ll ask what makes me feel less alone, and I can say her. But she doesn’t take the bait. Wary little fish.
“You’re driving in the dark,” she prompts instead.
“When there’s a flash of eyes. I slow, and this black-and-white fur bag appears beneath my headlights and when I stopped—I don’t know why I didn’t drive past—” I preempt her question. “I think I was just suddenly curious, and it was unusual for me. I pulled over and got out. He was shy at first, but I knelt down and with a bit of encouragement, he came to me. He was ugly and flea-bitten, limping, and missing part of one ear.”
Something in her expression sharpens.
“He was bleeding.” I nod. “I should have left him, or given him to literally anyone else to deal with.” But I’d felt like he’d chosen me to help him. “I drove him to the nearest veterinary clinic with the full intention of leaving him there.”
“It was you.”
“Da.” We regard each other in mutual understanding.
I walked into where Jenna works, and despite my resolve to leave Karik—or rather the unnamed puppy as he was then—the soft expression on Jenna’s face as she saw the little animal in my arms blew me away.
Something about Jenna clicked a switch in me.
“Tell me about…” She stops again.
This time I don’t help.
“The stalking,” she finishes eventually.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she breathes.
And I do. I tell her about waiting outside the vet clinic to see where she went to go home. About early mornings to ensure I was there as she walked to work.
I reveal how I hacked her phone to find out her social media accounts, and followed her there, delighted to find she loves the same things as I do. A darker, playful, savage side to life and love. A primal need to struggle and conquer, or be overcome and submit. Two sides to the same twisted coin. I explain how I set up notifications for her social media posts, and about the time I walked out of a London Mafia Syndicate meeting because I wasn’t going to delay reading her post for even five minutes.
She listens mostly in silence, and dips her head to hide her smile, not disconcerted as most people would be. The depth of my obsession doesn’t scare Jenna.
Brave girl.
It’s hours later that the tiredness catches her up she sinks in her chair, as though I’m telling her a bedtime story instead of about my fixation on her.
I stand and hold my hand out for her. She takes it, cautiously, and we walk back into the house and up to my bedroom. At the door, I carefully kiss her lips, chaste and sweet as she blinks up at me. Then I step away from temptation.
“Goodnight.”
“That’s it?” Her brows pinch with what the sadistic bastard part of me likes to think is disappointment.
“What did you expect after your first date, zayka?”
“I…” She swallows. “I thought…”
The tension between us stretches. I close the gap and lean down, careful to prevent our bodies from touching. If I allow myself more, I’ll never be able to stop.
“I’d like to fuck you right here in the corridor,” I murmur. “I’d happily take your little virgin pussy up against the wall, or in that big bed you’ll sleep in tonight.” I whisper the filthy words into her ear. “I’d delight in making all your dreams come true. However taboo, however dirty, whatever you need. I’d love to hold you down and defile you. Make you take my cock in every wicked position you can think of, and some you can’t begin to imagine.”
She trembles.
“But not while you have a gap in your memory that makes you doubt me.” I haven’t forgotten that she’s young and vulnerable.
“But—”
“And not on a first date.”
Easing back, I take her hand and gently kiss her knuckles.
“Sleep well.”
