Page 25 of Cruel Pawn
“Yep.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “I know everything now. Sorry it took me so long to find you. I thought it’d only take me a week to track you down when I went back to your flat and found you gone, but you’re very good at hiding, my opera.”
“I…” Fuck, I was speechless. He kissed my cheek, and my entire body responded. It felt like I caught flame, fire licking across every last inch of bare skin. I must have lost my mind because I still wanted him. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of how well he’d fucked me. It had branded my brain, burned its memory into my psyche until it was part of me. I hated admitting it, but even now I wanted him again.
The rush of disappointment when he slid off my body infuriated me. My stomach curdled, a hot splash of rejection in my gut. He literally kidnapped me—drugged and kidnapped me andchained me to a bed.Now was not the time for my rejection sensitive dysphoria to make an appearance. I didn’t want Arden to want me anyway. He’d been a target, a job, nothing more.
But he took you to the British Museum,a small voice reminded me, as if I could forget.He tookyou,not Carmen.
I hadn’t been able to forget that either. Everything else was part of the con, but that night was real. He sawmybook and took me to the library because Alice in Wonderland was important tome,and it was like a barnacle that clung to me, refusing to be pried off. The knowledge that he’d done what no one else had done and noticed me.
I didn’t evenwantto be noticed. I wanted enough money to find my parents’ killer and I wanted revenge. There was nothing beyond that.
“You must be hungry,” Arden mused, oblivious to my inner turmoil as he jumped off the bed and seemed to bounce across what I saw now was a living room with a rich forest-green, velvet three-seater sofa and a matching chair, both plump and inviting, scattered with black cushions edged in lace and a single white-fur cushion.
This room, house, whatever it was, was like a gothic nerd’s dream. Dark and sumptuous, as tempting as it was sinister. Even the kitchen Arden skipped—I mean it,skipped—into was dark and foreboding. Who decorated this place? Bram Stoker?
“I made sure to stock the cottage with all your favourites,” he told me. “It wasn’t easy getting through your laptop’s pesky little defences; that kept me away from you for a week when you could have been here, all mine, for seven entire days. But I needed everything to be perfect.”
“He’s fucking insane,” I whispered to myself, pushing myself as far up against the headboard as I could, ignoring the luxurious glide of pure silk against my naked body. Shutting out the way it felt like adoring hands on my skin. Pretending my core didn’t throb at the suggestion, at the memory ofArden’shands all over me.
Fuck, how soon could Stockholm Syndrome set in?
But no, I was safe, I didn’t love him. I just wanted him inside me again. Completely normal horny girl problems. And who could blame me when I knew exactly what he was capable of? When he looked like a walking wet dream. When he’d kidnapped me andchained me to a bed,like some dark, twisted fantasy come to life.
It was messing with my head. I pressed my thighs together, trying to calm the ache in my clit. He was definitely a psycho, and undoubtedly dangerous. I’d never known I had a type before. And learning my type was psychopaths was bad enough, but learning it likethis?Any normal person would be screaming and pleading to be let go, sobbing, falling apart. Instead, my brain must have been wired wrong because I’d jumped right past my normal destination—planning his murder—and ended up on the intersection of Take Me Now Lane and Fold Me Like A Pretzel Avenue.
I blamed the chains.
“Pretty girl,” he said, startling me back to the present. “You were miles away. What were you thinking about?”
I didn’t reply. Wouldn’t.
He paused by the sofa, halfway to me with a bowl on his hands and—fuck,why did that smell so good? I had to bite back a groan. It was like cumin seeds, chilli, coriander, tomatoes, and rich, mouth-watering meat. It was like—
“Is that…” There was no way he knew my favourite food, right? There was no way he could have found out that my mum used to make it for me every Friday because it was my all-time favourite and the recipe was passed down from my great-grandmother.
“You better not have been thinking abouthim.”Arden’s voice dropped low and vicious so suddenly that a tingling warning crept down my chest. I drew in another breath, filling my lungs with the scent of home, of family, of safety. A time of happiness,before I lost everything, before I saw the photos of their mangled bodies, before Grandfather began training me.
“Is that aloo gosht?” I asked in a too-small voice. The contract killer vanished, the woman who’d devoted herself to revenge swept away.
“Don’t change the subject, my opera,” Arden snapped. “Were you thinking abouthim?”
It showed how insignificant every other man on the planet was because the only man I could think of right now was Arden. I shook my head, confused. “Who?” Silvio and Grandfather were the only men in my life and—fuck, what if Arden know about Silvio? What if he’d hurt him or—
“Frederic,”Arden spat, the name like poison on his tongue.
“Oh, him,” I said, attempting to bat my hand and violently reminded that I waschained up.“No. Why would I think about him?” I wanted to laugh, but the look on Arden’s face as he came closer advised me against it.
There was a dark storm within those features, tightening his skin until it clung to the vicious edges of his jaw, his chin, his cheeks. His eyes were narrowed and hard, a brown so dark they could be black. My heart skipped in warning. I could well believe this man had a hit out on him. Gone was the happy-go-lucky cat dad who would never harm a fly. This man was danger personified. Violence wrapped in black sweats that really ought to have made him appear less threatening than his designer suits but somehow had the opposite effect.
“You saw what I did to him,” Arden seethed, his eyes clashing with mine, a light flaring within them that made my stomach flip (not necessarily in a bad way, because as previously discussed, my brain was wired wrong.) “Iwatchedyou, Priya. For a torturous, endless week. I saw the dates, the smiles you gave him, the touches he dared to place on your body. The body that belongs tome.”
A shudder cracked across my skin like a whip’s strike. I pressed back against the headboard as Arden placed the bowl on the small, black bedside table so he could crawl atop my body. The throb that rippled through my pussy went deep. I swallowed, heat spreading through my face, and knew he must be able to see all the dirty thoughts on my face.
But he was blinded by rage, by jealousy. “He wanted to fuck you. To put his cock whereminebelongs. To watch you pant beneath him. To watch you beg and plead for more. But he’d never get to watch you come, would he, my pretty poison?” A smile hooked his mouth higher on one side. “I don’t think you could come for a man as plain and ordinary asFrederic Lavigne.”
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “I don’t belong to you.”
His smile was a blade struck against a whetstone. It bit deeper into his cheeks as he knocked my thighs apart. Chained as I was, I could do nothing to stop his fingers gliding over my pussy. Nothing to hide how wet I was.
