Page 4 of Bought

“My price isn’t one you can pay.”

“Oh, no?”

“It’s integrity,” I say. “And you have a zero balance where that’s concerned.”

I am being ruder than I should be, but he has insulted me and wasted my time. He may as well just have blown me off. Then I wouldn’t have come here and made an idiot of myself.

One of his thick brows rises. “I see,” he says. “You like to think you’re independent, don’t you, little girl.”

“Stop calling me that.”

He ignores me completely and just keeps talking.

“Nobody is independent. Nobody exists on their own. Everybody has some place in the power structure, and if you’re not prepared to rise through it, you will find yourself sinking. I offered you a way out of what’s going to happen to you, Casey. Remember that.”

Now he’s just plain threatening me. I’m starting to lose my temper. And I’m starting to get scared again. A threat from Ethan Keller has to be taken seriously, but fuck this guy.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“I’m going to take you.”

“What?”

“I’m going to take you,” he repeats calmly, as if he’s saying something perfectly normal. “You’re going to be mine. I will train you to be something more than what you currently are.”

“You think you can make me a better software engineer?”

“I think I can make you my obedient possession.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” There’s an edge of panic to my voice, because on one level, I don’t understand what he’s saying at all. And on another level, I understand him perfectly. Ethan Keller is a man who owns things. People are no exception. Because people are just another kind of thing to him.

They say there are more sociopaths in CEO positions than anywhere else. I’m pretty sure I’m looking at one. I refused his offer, but that’s not acceptable to him. It’s not an option I have in his world. So he’s going to just… take me.

Except he isn’t, because I am a person and unlike the sycophants and whores he surrounds himself with, I don’t want him. At all.

“That is not going to happen,” I say as calmly as I can. Is he even connected to reality? Am I? It really did feel as though I lost something the moment I stepped into the Vipyr offices. The rules of the world outside these walls are somehow suspended at the instigation of this entirely dangerous man.

“It already happened,” he says with a thin smile. “We could have done this the easy way, but you wanted to make it hard. So I’m going to make it very hard. From this moment on, consider yourself mine.”

There’s something hypnotic about him. He is almost archetypically perfect. Above everything. Above me. As I stare at him in shock, I take in all the little details I missed in my first rush of nerves. His face is brutally handsome, chiseled, and groomed. Nothing is left to chance. Even his brows are tamed, though still masculine. Movie star good looks, that’s what he has. And that’s what makes this so confusing. He is a leading man, but I am no leading lady.

I can’t imagine what he has in mind for me, but I am one hundred percent sure whatever it is, I will not like it.

Okay. I have to calm down. There has to be a way out of this. I stand there and I think as hard and as fast as I can. It occurs to me that from his perspective, I just came in here and threatened his business. It’s not what I meant to do, but I guess I didn’t think it through thoroughly enough. If I had spent a little less time being so pleased with how smart I was to have figured this out, and a lot more time on thinking how it would be received, I would never have come.

“I’m not going to, uh, tell anyone about this,” I say, trying not to stammer.

“Oh, I know you won’t,” he says smoothly.

I gulp. “You’re going to have me whacked, aren’t you.”

A smile breaks through the facade of control, and for a moment I see him truly amused. He lets out a warm, rich chuckle and shakes his head at me. “You have a wild imagination, little girl.”

“Well, uh, you just said I was yours. And if you think you can own people, then it’s not a big leap to just getting rid of them when they pose a problem.”

“Try to think less in if/then statements,” he smirks. “And try listening instead of thinking. The moment you came in here, I decided I wanted you. I would have been happy to employ you, but you didn’t want that, so I’ll have to go a step further and take you.”

“Take me?” I squeak his words like a chipmunk echo.

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