Page 23 of Villainous
Again, I’m greeted with silence and a cold shoulder. She’s about to learn who’s in control here.
“Get up from the bed,” I order.
She doesn’t move, so I yank her by the legs, pulling her off the bed, and her ass hits the wooden floor.
“Fine. You want to act like a disobedient bitch, then I’ll treat you like one.”
She stands up, dusting off her clothes, and wrinkles her cute nose. “What the fuck, Vil?”
Ignoring her, I dig my nails into her sleeve and drag her out of the room.
She kicks and screams like a toddler. “Let me go, you bastard.”
A few of the maids stop and stare. When I glare at them, they look the other way, minding their business. They know better than to stick their nose in business that’s not their own. Once we’re in the elevator, I let her go, and then I tap the Down button.
She eyes me as if I have three heads and stands on her tippy toes, poking her finger into my hard chest. “I’m so sick of your shit, Villainous. What you did at the meeting wasn’t called for. If you were aiming to hit below the belt, then congratulations, you did it. If you were aiming to make me feel like a cheap two-dollar whore, then more power to you—you earn a cookie. How do you sleep at night? Getting off on hurting me.” She throws her hands in the air.
“With the ceiling fan on and the AC at sixty-five degrees,” I say, smirking.
She shoots me the bird. “All you do is treat me like shit, and I’m supposed to endure it because of something I did ten years ago? You can go fuck yourself.”
She’s got some goddamn nerve. Once again, she’s playing the victim, as if she didn’t leave a goddamn hole in my heart. As if my feelings never mattered. Most days, she makes me believe she never gave a damn about me, as if what she had done hadn’t broken her.
I want to backhand her so bad. Blood rushes to my ears, so I grab her by the neck.
“Go right ahead and do it,” she challenges, but fear clouds her eyes.
She wants to put on a brave face that says she’s strong and so bad. And if I call her bluff, then she will back down, just like the rest of my old pets. But I have bigger plans for little dove. I know exactly what’s going to get under her skin, and once this is all over, she’ll be begging for me to kill her. I let her go and take a step back until her back brushes against the wall.
“All I ask is for you to tell me why you left, and you can’t seem to do that. You didn’t even acknowledge what you did to me or apologize for leaving me.”
Her eyes move back and forth as if she’s thinking about something before tears well and her gaze drops to the dark carpet.
“I’m sorry for hurting you, but I’m not apologizing for leaving you. I had my reasons.” Her eyes snap to mine, and a flicker of remorse flashes across her face.
“Well, I have my reasons for doing this.”
My index finger and middle finger enclose on one side of her upper arm, and when the elevator door dings open, I walk into the hallway of my empty dungeon.
“Where are we going?” Her tone is filled with nervousness as she tries to snatch away from my grip, but I squeeze tighter, making her whimper like a dog.
Horror paints her lovely chocolate eyes as she swallows loudly. “I don’t want to be locked in the dungeon again.”
I don’t respond.
Tears slither down her pink cheeks as we pass each of the glass cells, the hint of copper and bleach filling the air. The dim light brightens our path as we make it to the end of the hallway.
I keep my girls and prisoners at a different location, so if the FBI tries to raid the place, there won’t be any evidence they were here. We stop at a glass cell, and I type in a code. Benny is tied up to the bed. Blood drips down his plump, bruised face, his breathing shallow. His naked, fat ass sinks into the mattress, his arms and legs spread across the bed like a cooked pig on a platter, ready to be eaten.
I kidnapped him a few days ago and decided to keep him alive enough to torture him.
“It seems you can’t remember who you are dealing with,” I lean down and whisper in Maya’s ear, removing my fingers from her arm. “But I’m going to remind you that you’re my pet, and if I tell you to do something, you do it. I don’t care if it’s as simple as running outside naked in the cold and saying you’re an alien.”
She sucks in a breath, and her eyes venture to the guy who’s tied up. A steel pole is shoved up his asshole as his blood drips down to the concrete. Benny is the guy that used to molest Roselyn when she was fifteen, and when I found him, he was balls-deep into a thirteen-year-old boy. This bastard has been fucking kids for years. I ran a background check on him with other people who worked with him. He likes to prey on poor famiglias so he can take advantage of them, feed them lies about how he’s going to help take care of them.
Devious told me to handle him because he made a promise to Roselyn he wouldn’t hurt him, but my brother is a sly person, and if he wants something done, he’ll go find a way to do what he wants and not break his promise to his wife. Even if Devious hadn’t told me about him and I found out about him being a kid fucker, I would have tortured and killed him anyway. I don’t condone that type of behavior to kids; they are innocent in this cruel world.
I want her to finish the job. It is her punishment—kill off this fucker. I yank my knife from my holster and hand it to her, then lean against the glass wall and shove my hands into my pockets.
