Page 18 of Little Blue

A whimper falls from my lips. I hadn’t meant for it to slip free, and clap my hand over my mouth.

My thoughts rattle. A tremble is overtaking my body. I whisper, “Where is that?”

“Russia.”

My stomach drops.

“How?” It takes everything in me not to fall to my knees. I’m shocked. Horrified. Confused.

He explains simply, “I took you.”

“You—you took me?” I gasp. I can’t breathe. I really—can’t—breathe.

“Yes.”

I shake my head, fingers clawing at the shirt that covers my chest. I’m still in my jammies, I realize. An oversized t-shirt and panties. Nothing more.

Oh, God. I can’t believe this.

My mind is spinning.

I think I might faint.

My vision blurs. A sharp fragment from my shattered puzzle slams into place, and I flinch.

Me, waking in the middle of the night in my room. Him, above me drenched in shadow as he whispered dark words.

I point a finger that trembles at him before I slap it against my now wildly beating heart. It’s rioting so violently inside my chest, so overcome with fear, I’m terrified it’s going to tear from my flesh to bleed out on his gleaming wood floor.

I sob.

Words leave my lips on a strangled breath, “You kidnapped me.”

“I did,” he confirms. There’s not even an ounce of apology in his words.

My world falls out from under my feet, leaving me to free fall into a very dark, very terrifying nightmare.

Eight

Ilya

I watch as she processes her new reality.

I’ve watched this process with many men over the years. It’s always entertaining, the panic that turns to a violent rage that burns out fast to a melancholy kind of acceptance. It’s a little different now than in my past experiences.

For one, I have no intention of torturing her.

I have no intention of watching as pebbles of scarlet dribble over her alabaster skin. The almost constant urge to dip my hands beneath flesh, past bone and muscle to the heart beneath, doesn’t grip me as I watch her chest heave with desperation.

She begins to pace on knees that look dangerously weak. When she stumbles, her hand flies out to catch herself against the wall, and my body lurches forward a step. The motion is involuntary, as it was the very first moment I saw her sitting at the roulette table. She’d looked sad, painfully resigned, and exquisitely beautiful as she pondered the bet she would place.

I’d been stripped of my constant control, then, too. Before I’d had the conscious thought, my body had been moving to close the distance between us. I was like a man at sea, at the mercy of a dark siren calling me to the depths below where the air would be crushed from my lungs, my flesh stripped from bone—devoured by her.

When she’d lifted those magnetically captivating, sad blue eyes to me, I’d felt that feared squeeze of my chest. The one my father spoke of. The one that confirmed my earlier suspicions that this earth siren would steal the very breath from my lungs.

When she spoke, the sad melody of her soft voice invaded every inch of my being, weaving into the very fabric of me.

It ensnared me to her then, calling me to her every moment thereafter.

---