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“Ah,” he said against my skin, as he sounded delighted with me.
“So, you can be trained after all.” I gritted my teeth at this and snapped like a fool with a death wish,
“What do you want?”
His free hand slid back down and settled on my hip, fingers spreading out and taking up more of me than any hand had a right to.
“Isn’t it obvious?” He hummed again, as if this was just foreplay and I shivered against him. But this was the part I couldn’t explain. Not the fear. The fear made perfect sense. But something went through me from the base of my spine outward, and it was not fear. He felt every inch of it happen under his palm before I could stop it. Because the bastard knew, which was why he looked down at me and smiled. A slow, knowing curve of his lips that made me swallow hard.
“Do I affect you, little nurse?” he asked in a soft voice that almost sounded tender and had no business belonging to a monster like him.
“No,” I replied as sternly as I could muster while being held prisoner against the wall.
“Then prove it…” he said, pausing long enough to dip his head to my ear and say…
“…let’s see if I can make you sing, little bird.”
9
THE SOUVENIR
ANNA
“…let’s see if I can make you sing, little bird.”
The moment he whispered this down at me, it sounded far more like a promise than a challenge. And that was the moment whatever bravery I had left went out of me completely.
The tears came in earnest then, pointless and humiliating, and I hated them more than I hated him. Because it just proved how little it took for him to rob me of my pride, especially with what came next as I begged him to stop.
“Please… please, don’t… don’t do this.”
He made a low sound as his thumb came up to my face and wiped beneath my eye, careful and impossibly gentle.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “I don’t permit it.”
A laugh escaped me at that, an ugly and disgusted one that didn’t sound like a laugh at all.
“Do you blame me? You’re terrifying.”
“I am,” he replied with no argument at all. He said it the way you would agree that the sky was above us. Then he leaned in until his forehead was almost against mine, and his voice went very quiet.
“I am terrifying to the rest of the world, but you are the only living soul who has nothing to fear from me.” And the worst part was that he meant it.
“So… you’re… you’re not going to hurt me?”
He drew back an inch and looked at me, catching my eyes and keeping them captured. Then what came over his face was the most frightening thing I have ever seen a man do… because it was pleased.
“Now, I didn’t say that” he said, causing my breath to hitch but it was what he said next that made my heart hammer against my chest, as if it was trying to claw its way out.
“But that depends entirely on how good you are for me.”
And that was when the buzzing started again.
Muffled, absurd, somewhere against my hip. The third time in twenty minutes, and I knew exactly what it meant, because my hands had already told me. Shaking against his grip in a way that had stopped being about him a while ago.
He went very still.
“How bad does it get?” I jerked at the question as I stared up at him. Of all the things I had braced for, a question about my medical history was not one of them, and my mouth simply refused to work.
