I sit back on the carpeted floor and stare at the face I’ve scraped into the pristine white wall next to the bed.
Pyotr. That was his name.
The jerk who shoved me into that jeep. The same jerk who carried me into this house.
Even as he manhandled me, his features caught my eye. His broad, flat nose that accentuated the sharpness of his jaw. It’s a half-assed sketch crudely scratched into the paint, but I know I nailed his appearance. The eyes are just as dead and devoid of original thought as they were in person.
He’s merely a robot, following the instructions of a monster.
I take the blunt point of the pencil I found earlier and move on to the mural of his master. He’s standing behind the dumb robot goon, but he’s still bigger, his presence suffocating and intoxicating and impossible to ignore.
I get so lost in my world that I don’t even notice the door open. Not until I see a shadow fall over my drawing do I realize that I’m no longer alone.
“Jesus!” I yelp, jerking back.
Yulia looks at me with an amused expression as she takes in my drawing. “Well, well… that’s an interesting way to deface my walls.”
My heart starts beating a little faster, but I try hard to shove down the fear. They’ve abducted me and trapped me in this room for almost two days. Why shouldn’t I deface whatever the hell I want? Tit for extremely-not-equal tat, right?
“There was a pencil in the desk drawer,” I explain. “But no paper.”
“So you decided to go for the walls?”
I blink. “Sure looks that way.”
She smiles. “Fair enough.” She moves to sit down on the edge of the bed just next to me and examines my drawing. “Is that… Pyotr?”
“I prefer to think of him as Pyotr 3000, Cyborg Extraordinaire.”
“The likeness is brilliant. And who is the figure behind him?”
The drawing is incomplete. I haven’t figured out how I want to capture the harsh lines and shadows of him just yet. For now, he’s only a silhouette.
“The master,” I say. “Or maybe I’ll call him ‘The Monster.’”
Yulia raises her eyebrows. “Also known as my son?”
“The fact that you made that connection speaks volumes.”
She gives me an amused glance. “Is that a speech bubble over Pyotr’s head?”
“Yes. But I haven’t decided what he’s going to say yet.”
“I imagine it won’t be flattering.”
“Probably not.”
“Maybe he was right about you,” she mutters under her breath.
I roll my eyes. “What did His Highness say about me now?”
She pushes herself off the bed and heads for the door. “You can ask him yourself. He’s granting you an audience.”
I drop my pencil and get to my feet. “What? He is? When?”
“Now,” Yulia says. “Come with me.”
I abandon my vandalism immediately and follow her out of the room. On the walk there, I try to compose myself. I compile a list in my head of all the things I want to bring up with him. As it turns out, it’s a very long list.
I’m so distracted I forget to pick up my feet. I trip on the bottom step of the grand staircase and again on the edge of a carpet that runs the length of the absurdly long hallway.
“Calm down, girl,” Yulia scolds lightly just before she opens the door. “Showing fear will get you nowhere.”
“Fear is all I have right now.”
She grabs my hand so suddenly that I don’t even gasp. It’s not a cruel gesture, anyway. When she looks at me, her blue eyes are comforting and protective. So completely unlike her son’s.
“Listen to me, Olivia: the only way to get him to listen to you is if you have his respect.”
I pull back, uncomfortable with the way she’s gripping me. “I obviously don’t have that. Nor do I know how to get it.”
“Hold your own,” she tells me. “Stand your ground.”
“Against him?” I balk. “He’s… he’s…”
An Adonis. A beast. An angel of death. I’m not short on synonyms, but I’m certainly not going to share any of my first choices with his mother.
But she gets the general gist of things. “He’s a titan,” she says, which also seems like a pretty fitting description. “And do you know the kind of person who stands up to a titan?”
“Someone suicidal?”
She smiles. “Someone brave.”
I don’t have time to tell her that I’m not brave before she opens the door and shoves me into the room.
It’s a cavernous space. A sitting area with couches clustered together off to one side. A large display case full of what appear to be weapons lurks in the opposite corner. Between the two sits the biggest desk I’ve ever seen, like it was carved from the bones of the earth itself.
Two arched windows set in the wall offer an uninterrupted view of the garden. They’ve been pushed open a crack. I can feel the cool breeze washing in from outside.
I find my eyes straying back to the glass display case. I’m no weapons expert, but some of these things look like they got their first use back when people still lived in castles and launched catapults at each other. I see bows and arrows, spears and harpoons, shields and armor scarred with the marks of war.
What kind of man collects such vicious-looking things?
A little voice in the back of my head gives me the obvious answer: the kind of man to whom violence is second nature.
The same man is now looking at me with festering impatience. The sunlight catches his face from the side, casting half in light and half in shadow. He looks unspeakably beautiful.
“You wanted to speak to me,” Aleks intones. “So, speak.”
“A crossbow?” I blurt, stalling for time. “You’re a walking cliché.”
He sighs. “I’m a collector.”
“So you don’t use it? Hunting peasants for sport, or something along those lines?”
“I can use it if the need arises.”
All the charm he exuded at the airport is gone. I wonder how I ever saw it to begin with. All I see now is menace. Aggression. A saw-toothed edge of a man.
And whatever meager confidence I came in here with is wilting on the vine. Yulia’s words keep echoing in my head, but I hear them in my father’s voice.
Hold your own.
Stand your ground.
Living is for the brave.
Simple words. The kind you’d find in a fortune cookie at some strip mall Chinese restaurant. They seem wildly out of place in this room, with this threat staring me down.
“Did you come here to waste my time?” he asks when I keep fidgeting in the silence.
“I didn’t come here at all, remember?” I remind him acidly. “You took me.”
“I’m assuming you have a point to make. Do us all a favor and get to it.”
I square my shoulders and look him right in the eye, ignoring every instinct in my body. “I want to know that my family is okay.”
“They were released the moment we cleared the street,” he says.
I frown. “How do I even know that’s true? What’s the proof?”
“My word.”
I snort. “I hope you can understand why that means nothing to me.”
“I’m not interested in understanding much about you, Olivia,” he says. “I think that puts us at an impasse.”
“An impasse implies that both parties have tried to compromise. But in our case, you’re the one holding all the cards. You have all the power.”
Aleks cocks his head to the side and gives me a smile that makes my insides tremble.
The attraction I felt for him still exists. Seeing him tie up my family, threaten my brother, and abduct me didn’t kill those feelings. It just made the tingling concentrated between my legs a thousand times more shameful.
“That’s right,” Aleks says with a nod. “I do have all the power. Your brother would do well to remember that.”
“He’s just doing his job.”
“And I’m doing mine.”
I shake my head. “This is not a job.”
“No?” he drawls. “Then tell me what it is. Tell me who I am. I’m simply dying to know.”
“You’re just some low life thug! A criminal whose mistakes are catching up to him.”
“Let’s suspend reality for a moment and assume that’s true,” he says casually, leaning back in his chair. “If I go down, I’m bringing everyone down with me. That includes your brother, Olivia. And now, it includes you.”
“My brother can take you.”
“You’re overestimating him.”
“I’m not. I know him.”
He springs forward so fast that I don’t even have time to back up. He stops right in front of me, and I’m glad I didn’t back away.
Stand your ground. If nothing else, maybe I can take the advice literally.
“But you don’t know me,” he hisses. “And trust me, little girl: you don’t want to.”
I draw in a shuddering breath. “You’re right about that. I already know enough.”
Aleks’s eyes glisten with the promise of violence. “If that were true, you’d know not to push me.”
“I’ve been confined to that room for almost two days. You’d probably keep me there forever if I hadn’t pushed for this meeting.”
He doesn’t respond. I’m not naive enough to believe I’ve made any leeway, but I’ll take any opening I can get.
“I want proof that my family is okay,” I insist. “I want a phone call.”
He looks at me with an amused expression. “You must be joking.”
“No,” I say, ironing the tremble out of my voice. “It’s a reasonable request. Just one call to make sure they’re all okay.”
“And what will you give me in return?”
That stumps me. I realize that that is exactly what he’s hoped to achieve. “I… I don’t have anything to give you.”
“Exactly. You have nothing to bargain with. So why would I even bother negotiating?”
My jaw goes slack. He gives me a condescending smile and an arrogant nod before turning away from me.
“I’ll have someone escort you back to your room.”
“No! Wait.”
He turns again, his eyes grazing up my body before settling on my face. “So you do have something I might want? Information, perhaps?”
I realize almost instantly what he means. “You really think I’d tell you anything about my brother? Even if I knew it?”
“It’s the only card you have to play,” he points out. “So why not play it?”
“Because blood is thicker than water.”
He smiles. “You’d be surprised.”
I decide not to analyze that right now. My mind is pivoting wildly, trying to think of some way I can get through to this man. But it feels more than a little like I’m just banging my head against a brick wall.
“I’m not going back into that room,” I say, trying to infuse my voice with the kind of confidence that Dad always promised I had deep inside me. “I won’t do it.”
“If you would prefer different accommodations, I have a cell in the basement that you might prefer.”
So much for subtlety. The threat is so direct that it makes the hair on my neck stand on end.
I know I should keep my mouth shut unless I want rats for cellmates. But something about the way he’s looking at me now makes me reckless.
Correction: something about the way he’s looked at me from the very start makes me reckless.
“Is that where you kept her?” I snap.
I expected a violent backlash. Instead, Aleks chuckles darkly. “Is this the part where I’m meant to confess to taking your brother’s woman?”
“She was his fiancée. Not his possession.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I say angrily. “In my world, taking a woman against her will is definitely not the same as cherishing her. One is love. The other is a crime.”
“There are worse sins.”
“And I’m sure you’ve committed them all,” I say.
“Many times over.” He inches closer to me again. “A smarter woman might watch her tone, if she believed I’ve done what you seem to think I’ve done.”
I frown. He has a point, as much as I hate to admit it. But something else hits me at the same time: if this was just about me, it would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut and wait for this to play out.
But this isn’t just about me. It isn’t even about me at all.
This son of a bitch threatened my family and injured my brother. He’s probably monitoring their movements as we speak, waiting for a chance to slaughter them all if Rob doesn’t bend to his will.
That’s not something I can just ignore. I’m brave enough to know that.
I take a step towards him, ignoring the way he drenches me in his shadow, his scent.
“As long as my family is in danger, I can’t and won’t keep my mouth shut. I will do whatever it takes to make sure they’re safe.”
“And would your brother do the same for you?” he asks coldly. “Or does he care more for the woman he lost than the women he has?”
“Let me talk to him,” I say, trying a different method. “Maybe I can convince him to drop the investigation.”
He gives me an amused smile. “It takes a devious mind to manipulate, Olivia. It also takes skill. You have neither.”
“Don’t try to bullshit a bullshitter, eh?” I bite back.
“Something like that.”
“A call won’t cost you a thing.”
“Not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“I want your brother to sweat,” he says viciously. “I want him to lose sleep wondering what I’m doing with you. I want him to be so plagued by guilt and worry that he simply does what I ask him to do. Whatever I ask him to do.”
I shake my head in dismay. “You’ve got the wrong man for that then,” I say. “Rob has principles. You might be able to get him to back off, but if you expect anything more than that, you’ll be disappointed.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.” He looks at me confidently. “I have a way of getting exactly what I want.”
The predatory glint snakes back into his eyes. I feel my skin flush with heat. I drop my gaze just as Aleks takes another step toward me.
Our bodies are maybe half a foot apart. His presence is as claustrophobic as it is titillating.
I hate myself for still feeling this way, knowing everything I know now. It makes no sense. But the animal part of my brain has been awakened by the beast in him.
That’s all this is, I tell myself. Carnal attraction. It’ll fade.
God, please let it fade.
“What’s wrong, Olivia?” Aleks murmurs. “Can’t look me in the eye?”
He takes another little step towards me.
“No,” I say, wishing my voice was stronger, wishing my tone was more commanding, more assertive. “Stay back…”
“What are you so afraid of?”
I shake my head while still managing to avoid his eyes. It’s like he’s getting bigger, his smell getting stronger. He dwarfs me in every possible way. “Just… don’t. Stop.”
“Is that guilt I’m seeing on your face?” Aleks muses. “Or shame?”
I gasp as my back hits the wall. I hadn’t even realized I was moving.
The door is just a few feet away, but even if I tried to make a run for it, I know my legs would never carry me that far.
“Please leave me alone,” I whisper, still trying and failing to muster up some authority in my tone.
“A little too late for that now, darling.”
He stops maybe an inch from me. If I dared to lift my eyes, I’d be staring at his chest. He’s so big that I feel breakable in comparison.
In some ways, it feels like he’s already broken me. The small, fragile part of me that felt like I was good enough when he deigned to look my way in the airport has crumbled into dust.
Of course he had an ulterior motive. I should have seen it from the beginning. But I was lost in the fairytale of it all.
“You’re scared your brother will find out about us, aren’t you?” he asks.
I pretend not to know what he’s talking about. “There’s nothing to discover.”
“How about the way you came on my cock?”
I cringe, angry tears jumping to my eyes. “You lied to me. You manipulated me,” I say, defending myself. “I didn’t know who you were then.”
He shakes his head, leaning towards me so that his breath kisses my nose. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he whispers. “I’m talking about the fact that, despite everything you know now, despite everything I’ve done… you still want me.”
