I scream and kick with all my strength, fighting him.
“Let me go!”
“You fucking tell me where your father is.”
“I don’t know anything.” The tears come hard now and the panic of what’s going to happen to me takes route in my soul.
The shuffling against his grasp makes this stupid gown ride up my thighs to the point where I’m exposed. Anyone, if there’s anyone else here, would see my bare ass and everything else.
“Let me go!” I wail. “Please let me go. Don’t hurt me.”
I fight for my life. My life that I don’t own, but it’s always felt like as long as I drew breath my life would be mine one day.
“Tell me where your father is.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. Please, let me go,” I beg.
He carries me back in the room and throws me down on the bed. In seconds he’s on top of me and my hands are pinned above my head.
The monsters from my father’s world were always lurking around the corner. Now one has me. Tristan D’Agostino has me and I can’t give him what he needs. I can’t even try to save myself. I hate my father so much right now. I hate him even more than I already did.
I hate myself more when Tristan presses his face to my cheek and my body reacts to him, confused by a memory from last night. His warm breath caresses my skin and I remember how he danced with me and he kissed me.
I was going to go home with him. To sleep with him.
How could I be so stupid?
It was all an act. A trap set for me because he saw I was lonely and desperate.
“Tell me what I need to know,” he demands. “Isabella, tell me where your father is.”
I hear the threat of what he’s not saying, and my soul now trembles with terror. I don’t know him. I don’t know what he’s capable of and what would make him see I’m not lying. I just know I have to try something. Anything.
“Tristan,” I whisper. A whisper is all I can manage in my despair. I’m so scared. “What would you do to me if I don’t tell you? Would you kill me?”
I think back to the kindness in his presence when we first met in the park. That was just days ago. He seemed so genuine. Why did he give me the origami flower if he was going to do this? It was a meaningless gesture on his part, but it meant so much to me.
“Would you really kill me?” I ask, turning to face him.
Suddenly we’re eye to eye. Eye to eye, soul to soul. I gaze long and hard into those bright blue eyes that trap me in the lock of his gaze. I feel I must have reached something inside him when his grip around my hands loosen, although he keeps my hands pinned above my head.
Fear, shock, anxiety, and curiosity roil inside me like a tempestuous storm and as my captor gazes down at me I’m not sure what to feel.
He lets go of my wrists, but I don’t get the fleeting second it would take to acknowledge freedom from his restraint as his fingers brush over the bare skin of my stomach.
That part wasn’t intentional, but … what is, is the linger of his thumb on the edge of my hip bone.
Tristan breaks the lock of our stare to scan over my body. The gown is just covering my breasts and half of my stomach. The struggle made the thing ride right up to my back so what he’s looking at is my nakedness from my waist down.
A different type of fear races through my mind as he continues to stare at my pussy, and I remain perfectly still.
What if he rapes me?
Men like him do things like that. I don’t know him and so far, I’ve said all the wrong things. I’ve done all the wrong things and I haven’t given him what he wanted.
He could take something else from me. Punish me in a different way. As I watch him looking down at my pussy, his fingers hovering over my skin, true fear closes up my throat. I don’t know if I could survive if he did something like that to me. It would break me.
When his gaze climbs back up to meet mine, the desire I see brimming within his eyes eradicates the fear of being