Page 8 of Owned

“They think they own me.”

“Let them think it.”

A slow, shivering smile curved over my lips.

“We can bind them in ways they’ll never escape.”

I didn’t have to fight them.

I didn’t need to run.

I would open my legs, bare my throat, and let them believe I was theirs.

And then I would make them kneel.

“That’s my girl,”the grimoire purred.

I slid lower into the water, letting it close over my breasts, over the bite marks, over the shadows of pleasure they had carved into my flesh.

Lucian wanted to claim me.

My stepbrothers thought they already had.

But they didn’t understand what it meant to give someone your blood. Your body. Your breath.

They didn’t understand what I had become the moment I stopped begging.

I wasn’t afraid anymore.

I was starving.

Let them come.

Let them believe I was theirs.

They would never see the chains until they were already bound.

I hated family dinners.

How was I supposed to just…sit hereknowing what our father planned to do to Avril?

She was ours.

Hidden from sight under the table, my hand clenched into a fist on my thigh.

Lucian sat at the head of the grand dining table like a dark king surveying his domain.

I’d always disliked this room. The ceilings were too high, and the intricately plastered vault high above us was tasteless and strange compared to the gothic beauty of the rest of the mansion.

The marble covering the floor and column capitals was expensive, and I only knew that because, when my fatherbrought me before him—his bastard son welcomed into the family—Bastian hadn’t shut up about it.

I hated every inch of it.

Just like I always had.

But there was something different about that hatred now—something sharper.

The flickering candlelight danced ominously across Lucian’s pale skin and moonlight-colored hair. His eyes, cold and predatory, swept over the faces seated across the table from him.

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