Page 7 of The Freedom in Captivity

The slight curve of her nose which she always hated, but I believed it added to her charm.

The column of her neck that would move beneath my palm. For as much as she might have looked like a doll, she revelled in being taken roughly.

She moans and rolls her head, blinking again as she tries to focus. Her lips part, a slight huff releasing, as though trying to speak. When she finally does, she snatches away so much of my control with her single word.

“Flynn…”

She recognizes me? I whirl backwards, turning away, my hands scrubbing over my face.

This is precisely what I wanted but not for her to figure it out herself. I wanted to be the one to tear up her reality. An unfamiliar sensation washes over me, and I can’t identify it.

Not pain. Pain is being punched in the face by my father.

Not hurt. Hurt is watching the girl I care for leave school one day and never return.

Not desire. Desire is fucking someone in ways so animalistic, the interaction ends with my scent imprinted on her.

Uncertainty. A foreign concept. Do I want her to recognize me?

I do.For multiple reasons, I want her to identify me.

I do because when she realizes the person she turned her back on is the one now controlling her life, she’ll see another mistake. As much as she might look like the girl I once cared for, she’s not.

She mumbles something else I don’t make out before her eyes shut again. I’m eager for her to wake and to determine which version I get. In her sleep, her mind has obviously pieced together what’s in front of her, but sometimes the conscious and the unconscious don’t always mingle.

In her last few seconds, I catch her statement before she passes out again, this time, for good.

“The boy with the pretty brown eyes I…”

Rozelyn

Ionce read that when we’re stressed, our mind takes us to the last place we felt the safest. Whether it’s when we’re asleep or wide awake, our brain makes the journey.

Mine returns to a place it hasn’t been in years, to high school. To my brief one-year stint in a public school, which was my attempt to distance myself from my parents, from mafia life, and from Yasmine. Dad was hesitant, but Mom, despite her family’s unwanted advice suggesting otherwise, was all for it. She’d do anything for me, even allowing me to pretend to be a regular teenager, knowing one day, the family’s pressures would land on my shoulders, and like her, I’d be useful in other ways—for marriage.

In that single year, I found something else. Someoneelse. Someone who I wouldn’t have thought could affect my life so completely. But he became who I searched for the moment our driver dropped me off at the front doors each day. The person who needed someone as well, even when he didn’t admit it. A loner by preference, but a loser, according to others. But he had scars. Scars he didn’t enjoy sharing, but I became the lucky person who managed to get to see them.

After that year, after I was taken from him, I moved on because I had to. I knew he did too. We were a brief blip in one another’s misery. It took many months to stop seeking him out everywhere I went, even when I knew I’d never find him amongst the lavish parties, high-end restaurants, or expensive shops.

Despite the memories, the wound in my thigh forces me awake before dragging me beneath the blackness again. Somewhere within it, I see them—his eyes.

Only his eyes. His face a blur of years gone by, of my brain aging the teenager I once knew into the age he should now be—twenty-nine.

This time, the dark eyes pull me from sleep again, but as I straighten my neck, rolling the kink from it, I find the figure standing a few feet away, partly shadowed by where the glow from the lightbulb can’t reach, his eyes staring unblinkingly through the darkness.

No…That can’t be. His eyescan’tbe the same as the ones I’m remembering. This is my mind playing tricks. Taking something I’d been envisioning and shoving it overtop reality is cruel. As if I’m not in enough pain as it is.

“Staying awake this time?”

His voice is deep, sexy, and if the situation was different, I’d appreciate it. The kind of voice I’d enjoy growling in my ear as he fucks me roughly. But it’s not one I recognize.

“Does it matter?” I aim for venom, but I’m still sleep-laden and not sure it comes out in the way it should.

“You’re no fun to me half-dead.”

“Yet, I assume by the time you’re finished with me, that’s exactly what I’ll be.”

The darkness moves, his shoulder lifting in a shrug, trying to downplay the truth within my statement. “Maybe you should have thought of that before poisoning Aurora Corsetti.”

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