Page 63 of Seduction

I don’t know why he seems so transfixed by her when she’s made it clear she will never want him, but I think it’s more about the chase now.

I hear his footsteps coming before the door flies open and the room floods with light, temporarily blinding me. When my eyes adjust, the absolute look of anger and murder on his face is undeniable.

“I heard you wanted a word with me,” he spits through his teeth, and I have to fight off the smile wanting to break free. Whatever he does to me, I can live with knowing that his anger is something for me to be proud of.

My little girl is a fighter that he really wasn’t ready for.

“Yeah. Heard you throwing a tantrum and figured I would see what all the commotion was about,” I reply with a tone that implies boredom even though I’m anything but at the moment.

“Be careful, Brent,” he hisses my name as though it’s poison on his lips. “You do not want to taunt the devil right now.”

That’s where he’s wrong. I do want to taunt the devil because it will anger him enough to make mistakes. It just takes the right mistake for those men to track him down, and I will help them do it any way I can.

“Why are you so angry?” I lift an eyebrow in question, and he screams into the room before stalking over to me and getting in my face.

“I lost some good men tonight to a fucking neanderthal!” His fist follows his words, punching me right in the kidney with a force that almost makes me puke, and I know for a fact I will be pissing blood because of that hit.

“You tried to get to her, didn’t you?” I push out through the pain.

“She’s MINE!” he hollers right into my face, his spit flying everywhere.

“She’s not,” I tell him again.

She’s irrevocably in love with those seven men. I know, because Dimitri taunts me with images of her with them, some of them enough to make a father ill at seeing his little girl like that, but it’s the look in her eyes.

In every single image, there’s a deep love that shines. A love not unlike the one she has for me, but stronger and deeper in a way that would never be between a father and daughter.

Dimitri doesn’t realize it, but those pictures give me more and more hope with each and every viewing because, even though I know she’s hurting from my current loss, she’s not forgetting to live.

Most of all, she’s trusting them, and me, to get out of this so she can have the life she’s always wanted. The life I’ve always wanted for her.

I’m not an idiot. I know I won’t go back to her whole, but I will go back to her alive. My will to live is for that girl and only her, and I refuse to be the one that crushes her soul.

“How many times do I have to say it, Dimitri? She. Is. Not. Yours!”

He pulls back, ripping a knife out of his pocket and slamming it into the muscles of my thigh making me holler out from the pain, and a satisfied look crosses his face before he stands.

Slipping a small camera from his pocket, he starts snapping photos of me bleeding and in pain making sure he gets a closeup up of my face, and then a closeup of the knife lodged into my thigh before pulling back.

“Perfect. That will get my Dove’s attention,” he says offhandedly as he scrolls through the pictures, and my stomach turns.

Fuck. Haliee is tough, but that’s going to be a hard fucking pill for her to swallow.

I throw up a prayer to whatever God will listen, that when Haliee sees them, she doesn’t let it break her.

“You son of a bitch,” I spit out, breathing through the throbbing in my leg, and he cackles.

“I think I will leave that knife in there for now. Wouldn’t want you to bleed out or anything. Not that I hit anything vital, but still.” He shrugs, kicking the leg with the knife lodged in it, sending a shooting pain throughout my body as I tighten up to stop from screaming.

Once he’s had a fill of seeing me in pain, he leaves the room, shutting the light off and once again shrouding me in the darkness I’ve grown used to.

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