Page 30 of The Villain's Captive (The Villain's Duet 1)

I swallowed, my throat dry and mouth feeling like I had eaten sand. “Then what does all of this have to do with them? With me?”

“Shhh,” he cooed. “We’ll get to that part soon enough.”

“What do you want from me?”

He jerked my face, forcing me to look him in the eye. “See, the answer to that would have been simple, had you asked me three years ago. But now,” his tongue darted from his mouth, licking his lips, coating them with a shimmer of wetness, “now it doesn’t seem so simple anymore.”

The sting of unshed tears threatened to break down my resolve, and I tried my hardest to bite it back. “I guess this is the part where I ask you what changed.”

“That’s another tricky question to answer.”

I didn’t even realize he had dropped his other arm to my side until he gripped the silk of my nightgown between his fingers, touching my waist through the smooth fabric.

I desperately tried to ignore how his touch burned like a simmering coal that had the potential to ignite a fire that would destroy everything in its path.

“So, what…I’m a job?”

“Indeed, you are. A unique and extremely complicated one.”

“What does that even mean?”

His fingertips touched my naked flesh as he held the fabric hostage, and it was impossible to ignore the tainted desire that infected me. This must have been that twisted part in me, that part he woke when he cupped my breast, making me aware of the dark warning of something perilous flickering inside me like a stalking threat.

“It means”—his hand slid down the side of my leg, only to return up across the inside of my thigh—“that you are a job that has the potential to ruin me.” With leisurely circles, I felt him move his fingers up…up…until a single digit brushed against my sex. The involuntary moan that slipped from my lips left a bitter taste on my tongue. I was supposed to hate his touch, to fight and scream and beg him to stop. To feel violated and repulsed by him. Yet my body felt bewitched by the dark seduction that emanated from him, wrapping its tendrils of twisted temptation around my body. I was desperate to keep my expression cold and hard, unaffected by his sick, twisted fucking game. But the longer his touch lingered, the weaker I became, and I couldn’t stop my eyes closing as that flicker turned into a flame, his finger continuing its delicate caress against my panties, my body building with a strong rebellion to betray me.

He brushed his lips up the side of my face, my skin now hyperaware of every touch, every breath, every sound. “I have killed enough people to earn me an eternity in hell. And even though I can kill just about anyone I fucking want without the slightest of hesitation, you, my dear cellist, are the one person in this entire goddamn world I can’t kill.”

I sucked in a breath, not knowing whether it was relief or disbelief that caused me to shudder. “Why?” I swallowed thickly and licked my lips. “Why can’t you kill me?”

“Because you’re special, Charlotte Leigh Moore.” My name rolled off his tongue like a prayer and a curse combined, as if I were his saving grace and the sin that would cause his descent from the heavens. It was equal parts terrifying and enticing, causing every muscle to tremble while my thighs clenched.

His finger prodded at the hem of my panties, my body humming with anticipation, yet my mind was screaming, yelling at me to stop him. To fight. To not let him tip my body over the edge, because if he did, I’d never be able to come back from it. But I was caught in his web of seduction, my fight tangling me tighter until there was no way out, and I could only watch as my demise approached.

I squeezed myself against the wall. “What makes me so damn special?” My voice echoed the staccato of broken resolve that possessed me while his touch burned.

“You were just a means to pay a debt owed.” His lips grazed all along my jaw. “You were a promise, nothing more. But after all this time, watching you, studying you, infiltrating your life—your music…Jesus, your music,” he breathed out, the hot air that left his lungs easing along my flesh, igniting a flame in my core, “it became my drug, my escape from this wretched fucking world. And then I found myself being around you, close to you not because I had to,” he looked at me, a maze of secrets and confessions, “but because I wanted to. Because I was drawn to you and this emotion your music stirred inside me.” His voice trailed off, and I found myself swept away by his every word—entranced, captivated by everything he had just said, and I allowed myself to forget the events that brought us to this moment. The fear, the panic, the lies, it evaporated, replaced by this burning need to know more. To know everything about this man and whatever the hell this was that pulsed and beat between us.

“So, you see? You became something more than just a debt, or a job,” he continued as his fingers lingered against the side of my face.

“What? What have I become?” There was no rhyme or reason for me wanting an answer, for even pursuing this conversation. But there was a burning need to know what it was that earned me the attention of a man like Elijah. A man who bathed in darkness and basked in sin. A man who did whatever he wanted, took whatever he wanted.

His gaze dropped to my lips the moment he managed to get past the barrier of the thin piece of fabric between my legs, slipping a finger through my heat. I craned my neck, leaning against the wall as evil desire gripped me, twisted me, and tied me up in the barbed wire of his vicious and ruthless seduction.

“You, my dear little cellist, became an addiction I willingly surrendered and drowned in night after night. And now,” he slipped a finger inside me, and I gasped, my body climbing from the unwelcome intrusion. “Now you’re an obsession.”

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