Page 2 of Taking

Ciarra had begged me not to, but I’d had faith in my strength to look down my nose at him like the piece of shit he was. I’d expected closure from the reading of Mother’s will. Hoped for it.

No such luck.

I’d have been better off showing up with a pitchfork and stabbing him in the groin before making eye contact with the bastard who with one glance had me feeling like a powerless sixteen-year-old again.

Two months until I gained true freedom—

“Sweetheart.” Lloyd’s rumbling voice outside the bathroom door caused me to gag again, and I coughed, choking. “Are you alright?”

Eyes clenched shut, I rocked back onto my heels to suck oxygen into my lungs. “Fuck offf, Lloyd,” I spat out and coughed again.

The doorknob turned, and dread rolled through me—I hadn’t locked it.

Lloyd loomed over me in the small half-bath before I could stand, putting his groin right in front of my face.

I turned my head away from him, my stomach flayed open as memories crashed into my head, shrouding my mind with darkness and making every cell in my body as weak as a baby seal.

“Sweetheart, look at me.”

My stomach heaved again at the same words that haunted my nightmares, but nothing came up. Forced to my knees. Jaw pried open. Gagging and tears over the pain in my throat and his whispers of me being a good girl.

Eventually, I had stopped fighting. What was the point? I’d been without a choice, a toy for him to fuck with—

“Addilyn Jane.”

A sob ripped from my lips as Lloyd grasped me beneath the arm pits and hauled me up against his hard chest. Panic lay dormant from years of repetitive trauma.

“No! P-Please, don’t!” I couldn’t find the strength to do more than whisper and wish for a knife to stab into his balls.

“Shh.” He caressed my back, his lips against the top of my head as I struggled to push his heavier weight away. “There’s nothing you can do about this,” he murmured, his arms a vise around me. “I knew from the first time Ingrid showed me a picture of her beautiful daughter that you were always meant to be mine. I’ve gone three years without you… and now that she’s dead, we can finally be together.”

“I was meant to be Gideon’s!” I cried out what I knew would piss him off.

“And he hates you for what you did to him,” Lloyd reminded me.

The monster had informed me of that fact after his son got sentenced for assault on the first boy to kiss me.

“He doesn’t want to see you ever again.”

I went limp in his arms and sobbed against the memory of the heartbreak I’d felt in that moment in the courthouse. The pain and emptiness I relived every time I remembered what I had done, responsible for Gideon’s incarceration.

I shouldn’t have told the truth under oath.

Doing so would have saved him jail time—and my innocence.

“I can soothe your torment, sweetheart,” Lloyd murmured against my hair. “Let me.”

Soothe my torment…he’d never done anything but provoke it. Self-loathing for my body’s involuntary arousal to the pain he’d caused helped me summon the strength to fight.

“No!” Eyes shut tight, I wrenched my head away from his searching lips, his lips ghosting over my ear.

“Don’t fight me,” he said, all trace of nicety gone from his voice as his grip tightened around my arms, clenching me hard enough to bruise. “I hold your life in my hands, Addilyn. Every penny you stand to inherit is mine unless you do exactly as I say.”

“I’m not some teenage kid you can threaten anymore, Lloyd,” I choked out through the tears rolling down my cheeks, still straining to keep my mouth from his searching one. Heat flushed through my body, tensing my muscles. “I won’t be owned. I won’t be manipulated. Let go of me!”

“There will be rules.”

Fuck that. I’d had enough of his rules.

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