Page 134 of Taming Seraphine

“For what?”

“All the money he’d spent on me since I was born.”

Leroi makes a disgruntled sound.

“Yeah. He said since Mom was dead, I had to work off her debt.” I say, my voice barely more than a whisper. “He left me down there for hours with no food and water until I was weak and feverish. That’s when he brought the twins and introduced me as their new toy.”

Leroi hisses through his teeth. “They just accepted that?”

“Gregor laughed and said no, but Dad insisted. He said they could do whatever they wanted, but they couldn’t leave any permanent marks.”

When Leroi doesn’t react, I continue. “Gregor rejected me at first, saying that little girls weren’t his type and he didn’t want Samson’s sloppy seconds, so it was just me and Samson until he made the mistake of forcing me to give him a blow job.”

“That’s when you bit him?”

I nod. “It was worth it at the time because Samson didn’t touch me like that again.”

Leroi relaxes a little before asking, “What happened next?”

“The twins beat me up, then left me to starve and fester until Dad came charging in, screaming about me ruining his son. By then, I was too weak to care. I thought he was going to throttle me until Gregor stopped him.”

“Why?” Leroi asks.

“I didn’t understand what was happening until I woke up one day drenched in cold water. There was a new man in my room. He said he was there to train me. That I was going to learn to kill to pay off Mom’s debts.”

Leroi’s breath hitches. “Who was he?”

“Gregor called him Anton.”

FIFTY-ONE

LEROI

My stomach clenches at the reminder that Anton, the man responsible for saving me from my deadliest mistake, turned an innocent young woman into a killer.

Not even a woman.

Seraphine had been a mere girl. Traumatized, imprisoned, grief-stricken, and subjected to sexual assaults, she was at her most vulnerable and had no means of self-defense.

I force breaths in and out of my lungs, my heart pounding so hard that I’m sure she can feel my body tensing with alarm. I want to believe it’s a different Anton from a different organization; anything other than what I know is true. He called the day after my massacre at the Capello mansion, asking about Seraphine. His missing Lolita assassin.

There’s no denying the facts. Anton turned Seraphine into the sickest form of honey-trap. An underage girl sent to seduce and murder perverts.

My grip on her wrists loosens, and I take a few deep breaths before forcing myself to speak. “What did he do to you?”

“The first thing he did was attach a remote-control collar that delivered electric shocks,” she pauses, and her breath slows. “He said it’s how he trained all his bitches.”

The rest of her account is eerily familiar to my own training, minus the schedule of reward and punishment. Anton was firm and fair, but I had been an eager student. After failing to kill my stepfather, I was determined never to make the same mistake. As a sixteen-year-old girl suffering abuse and trauma, Seraphine would have been terrified.

“There was a lot of calisthenics, some cardio, knife skills, and practicing with syringes.” She sighs, her weight pressing against my chest. “Was your training similar?”

“Not nearly so brutal,” I murmur. “I also learned explosives and how to use guns.”

“What was your trainer like?” she asks.

My throat thickens. Do I tell her we were both inducted by the same man? Seraphine reacted so terribly when I mentioned that the first target she killed was my uncle. How would she react if she discovered that the man who trained her like a dog had treated me like a son?

Knots of apprehension twist in my gut, blazing an agonizing path to the back of my throat. “That’s a difficult question.”

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