Sold To Mr. Milano - Daniella Wright Page 0,26
was sharper and painful than the one before. I realized this was the tactic. It was a slow build of my muscles seizing up from the cold. I couldn’t wipe anything from my eyes or even curl over myself for warmth. But no matter how tense it could, I refused to cave into him.
“What if I really don’t know anything?” I suggested as I spat another rush of dripping water from my face. “You might even suspect that I don’t know anything, and you’re just trying to save face. Your brothers are taunting you and belittling you because you’ve been had. I fooled you. And you think the only way you can fix it is to draw something out of me...So you can pretend that bringing me here wasn’t for nothing.”
“You take pride in that?” He asked with a sharp inhale. “To deceive people?”
“To deceive you? Yes. You are not like other people. You’re a monster, and I would lie to you all over again if I could.”
“Just because you’re not pregnant doesn’t mean you’re not a whore,” he hissed before splashing me again.
“And I’d still rather be a whore than be a sad excuse for a man like you,” I defended coldly.
He threw the remaining buckets over me with a fury, sending each one crashing to the corner of the room with a terrible sound once it was emptied. The shock of it in my ears as they echoed between the walls was a lot to take in along with the cold sting on my shivering skin. It overwhelmed my senses, and I could feel my vigor fading. I kept spouting off whatever insult I could, even though I worried what would happen now that he was out of water to throw on me.
“It’s disappointing really to see you like this...Desperately trying to prove what a big strong man you are while lacking the courage to actually follow through with anything.”
My chest heaved as my bottom lip quivered from the icy chill that pounded through my bones. My clothes were sagging heavily from my body, clinging to my curves. My nipples were hardened and cutting through the soaked white fabric that was now see-through. Alberto noticed all of this too, and couldn’t keep from feasting his eyes on the sight. It made me cringe to be stuck there with no way to ward off his wandering vision moving over me.
“I’ll ask you again,” he said in a low rasp. “What do you know? What is it that you were rushing off to tell your father?”
I almost blurted that I wasn’t rushing off at all. I wanted to confess that I was only trying to find out more than what I had discovered in the basement, if for nothing more than to rub it in his face that he was wrong. But for as much fun as that would be, it wouldn’t do me any good. And once I started letting that slip, the rest of it may start spilling out too. At least I did know about the unclaimed goods hidden away in his basement, and I could piece together how they used those things as leverage in their other nefarious dealings. I wouldn’t give that much up. Maybe I still stood a chance of getting out of here and reporting them. It wasn’t the half of what they were up to, but it only took small charges to put everything else to a halt.
“I will never tell you anything, Alberto.” My words were strong, but the delivery was weak. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about a warm blanket and a bowl of soup. It would feel so good to sit in front of a fire, curled up in a ball, relieving the strain of my stressed muscles and limbs.
His big black boots stomped across the floor, moving closer to me. They stomped through the puddling water and I shivered even more as the splashed drops hit me. It was a wonder I felt them at all with how drenched and freezing I already was.
This was it, I thought again. This was when he would snap and reach out to strangle me. But he had a strange look in his eyes that made me fear for something much worse. Flaming up with all of that rage and hatred for me was a lustful look of desire...one that he seemed to be struggling to control.
Once he was within a foot of me, he lunged forward to close the gap between us.