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She’s pulled her knees to her chest, arms wrapped tight around them, hair hanging loose around her face like a curtain she’s hiding behind. The glittery scrap of fabric they’d dressed her in catches the low light from the reading lamp and throws it back in obscene sparkles. Irrespective of all her bared skin, it makes my gut twist instead of making my mouth water.

It makes me fucking sick.

I’ve inspired fear in people before. Of course I have. It’s an occupational hazard, honestly, and often deserved. You don’t spend two decades in the Bratva without learning what it looks like when someone’s afraid of you. I’m well-versed in all manner of micro-expressions, the body language, the particular manner in which a person strives not to give themselves away while obviously weighing whether to freeze or make a break for it. Frankly, I’ve learned to weaponize most of it. I do what I have to.

Except, this is different. This woman isn’t a soldier who knows the game and is weighing his odds. At least I don’t think so. This is a woman who has been drugged, stripped, paraded, and sold, and is now sitting on a stranger’s couch in a converted church, staring at the man who bought her like he’s the final entry on a list of horrors she wants to wake up from.

I have never felt more like a fucking villain in my life.

I’d felt great when I’d made the choice, commending myself for not acting like a complete fucking animal, despite recent evidence to the contrary. In retrospect, it doesn’t feel chivalrous enough that I’d put her in the living room rather than my bedroom.

Besides, the bedroom’s occupied anyway—Div and Mara are locked in there, and they’ve been expressing their displeasure about this arrangement at full volume for the past twenty fucking minutes. Their cacophonous barking makes the most of the church’s acoustics.

“Wh—Who are you?” Her bottom lip trembles, feeble. “Are you—are you torturing dogs in here?”

I blink. Of every possible opening line—pleading, screaming, threatening, bargaining—this woman, who is visibly terrified and shaking and has every right to be hysterical, has chosen to inquire about the welfare of my dogs. It’s fucking endearing.

I bark out a guffaw I can’t help. A brash, entertained laugh that’s startled out of me. A sound I watch her flinch over, which kills the laugh pretty effectively.

“No,” I say wearily. “I’m not fucking torturing dogs. They’re my babies. They’re only locked in the bedroom because I didn’t know how they’d react to a stranger, is all.”

She stares at me staring at her. Her fear doesn’t recede. But some gears behind that devastating face are obviously turning, even through the residual haze of whatever sedative they’d pumped her full of.

Great. I need her mind working and sharp. After all, it’s not like I can get information from a catatonic woman.

Eyeing her, I take a seat on the coffee table in front of her. “What’s your name?” I ask.

Her eyes narrow, fascinatingly. “You kidnapped me and you don’t even know my name?”

This time, I do manage to bite back my laughter. “I didn’t kidnap you.”

“No? Then what would you call this?” She gestures expansively at herself, then all around her in sweeping motions of her arms. “Because from where I’m sitting—on a stranger’s furniture, in a stranger’s church, in a whorish outfit that I did not put on myself—this feels a lot like a kidnapping. It feels like every woman’s worst nightmare.”

“Technically,” I say, and I already know this is going to go poorly, “I purchased you.”

The silence that follows has barbs. Fear wars with loathing in her eyes.

“You purchased me,” she repeats.

“At an auction you were brought to by the motherfuckers who did abduct you, yes,” I confirm.

She looks at me incredulously. “Is that meant to seem magnanimous to me?”

She uses big words. It’s hot. “Just stating a fact, gorgeous.”

“Are you hitting on me?” Disgust drips from the words.

I cock an eyebrow. “Do you want me to?” I wasn’t, honestly. It’s a fact: she’s fucking gorgeous. I also don’t know what the fuck her name is, unless she wants me to call her ‘Lot Seven’. My wit is a reflex, and it fires whether I want it to or not. A habit of forty-one years is not something I can switch off because a woman with mythic eyes is looking at me like I’m the one who’s lost my fucking mind. Even if it’s possibly true. “Listen, I don’t want to make this ugly. It’s possible you’re just a really fucking unlucky person. But I need to know who you are. I can find out on my own—I have the resources—but it’ll be faster and less invasive if you just tell me. Your name, for starters.”

She continues to stare at me. Loathing might be winning against the fear, it looks like. I can’t decide if I should be glad about that or not.

“I can’t even think,” she says through clenched teeth, “with the sound of your dogs losing their minds.”

A frown creasing my forehead, I study her for a beat.

She holds my gaze back, adamantly. It’s as if she refuses to look away, even as her instincts beg her to; her fear hasn’t dissipated in the least, but I suspect there’s a spine in this woman, buried beneath the terror, and it’s forged from steel. After this long in a world as dark as ours, one learns to get a sense of others’ mettle swiftly.

Finally, “Fine,” I say, and push off the table.