Page 62 of Little Blue

“How can you be sure?” The idea of anything ever befalling Lucy has my heart cramping painfully in my chest.

“The girls are very gentle with my mother’s dog, much to my father’s annoyance, I’m sure.” He chuckles darkly. “The thing is smaller than Lucifer, and far more annoying.”

“And the girls are good with it?”

He nods. “Like I told you, they will not harm without command.”

“Unless someone unfamiliar happens along.”

“Probably not even then. Introductions are a precaution I take to avoid messy inconveniences. It’s more likely that they would incapacitate an intruder and wait until they received a command to either release or finish the job.”

Again, I shiver. Ilya frowns. “Are you cold?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“We’ll go inside.”

“No.” I’m reaching for his hand before I’ve thought it through. “I want to walk.”

Ilya looks down at our hands, and I hurry to drop his only for him to reach out and wrap his large hand around mine. My heart knocks in my chest. An uncomfortable, persistent bludgeoning, that’s going to destroy all my walls eventually.

I can’t wait for eventually to happen along. I must escape him before he steals my heart like he stole my body.

Setting my jaw, I look forward. The dogs are leaping and rolling in deep snow. They’re living their best lives, that’s for sure.

“They’re happy.” I point out the obvious.

“If you let yourself, you will be, too.”

I pretend I don’t hear him as I take in the snow-capped trees that seem to stretch on for miles, and the big, stone house under a backdrop of blue-grey sky. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen and feels almost as though I’ve stepped back in time to a dark fairy tale. It’s magical and yet haunted. Breathtaking with a surging, ominous undercurrent.

If I’m not careful, I might lose my footing. If I lose my footing, it’ll pull me under.

When my eyes slide over the trees again, I wonder, if I ran, would I ever make it to the break on the other side? Would I stumble into freedom, or would I be consumed by the dark forest that spears from the ground to surround this dark man’s estate?

I suspect the odds aren’t in my favor.

“Come, my heart.” Ilya tugs me into his side. “You’re shivering again.”

Whether the odds are in my favor or not, I have to try.

Because every time he speaks those words to me—my heart—I feel as though he’s carving into me. Branding his dark desire into the very fabric that weaves the tattered threads of my soul.

I have to escape. Or forever be consumed by him.

Twenty-Six

Irelynn

After that first night when Ilya returned home and he devoured me, quite literally, in his bed, he hasn’t forced himself upon me again. At least not in the same way.

I’m not delusional enough—yet—to say that what Ilya does isn’t wrong. It is. Everything the man does is wrong. The very fact that I’m here, still, three weeks after he kidnapped me, is wrong.

But he hasn’t made me come unstitched at the seams since that night when he first returned from wherever he’d disappeared to, to deal with whatever business he’d had to deal with. And we haven’t talked about that night, either.

I, for one, can’t seem to make myself bring it up. Just the thought turns my face red hot, and my body buzzes.

What he has done, however, is hold me every night with his hand up my shirt. Or his shirt, but he makes me wear it. His forearm rests in the valley between my breasts, and his big hand cradles me. Sometimes around my neck, sometimes he holds my cheek in his big palm.

---