Billionaire's Captive Complete Trilogy - Stasia Black Page 0,74
searching for...something, anything in his eyes, but they’re hard, blue stone.
I snatch the salve from where I’d dropped it on the couch before. And then I’m out the door. It’s only after he slams it behind me and I’m in the taxi zooming away from my childhood home that I remember Belladonna. The company. The research.
Everything I worked my whole life for—he now has control of it. A man who hates me and my family.
I look out the window. It all seemed so important, so vital, only weeks ago. Like there was nothing more important in the world. But now, as I glance out the back window, my ass smarting even though the seat is soft and plush, all I’m hoping for is a glimpse of him.
Five
Present Day
Logan
I watch from an upstairs window as she drives away. Am I fooling myself or do I see her hand pressed against the glass of the window as she looks back?
I turn away. “Fucking idiot,” I roar and look around for something else to smash but I’ve already tossed and smashed her precious Thornhill to ruins. Shards of expensive vases and mirrors and plates and glass litter the marble floors. I’ve ripped paintings off the wall and slashed through the precious canvases. I played Nine Inch Nails on full blast in the ballroom while I spray-painted the tapestries and drew obscenities on the statues.
The room I fucked and punished Daphne in was the one room that remained intact, and only because I fell asleep in the master suite last night before I could remember to drag my drunken ass back downstairs to desecrate it.
I stretch my hand out and bring it to my nose. It’s still fragrant from her scent.
Her scent that he probably knows now. Because she gave away what’s fucking mine. After she promised me, she gave it away. Like it all meant nothing.
I roar and grab the leg of the four-poster bed, ripping and yanking until I separate the tall pole off the footboard. And then I attack the wall with the makeshift baseball bat, smashing and destroying and taking out my rage until dust and drywall rains down all around me and coats my sweat-soaked skin.
I slump, exhausted, to the floor and bow my head. I didn’t sleep last night. How could I? When I’m used to her warm body, when I let myself imagine getting used to it forever— The pain sears fresh all over again but I don’t have the energy to destroy anything else. I lie down and lay my head on my arm. Cold. Uncomfortable. A shard of a vase cutting into my thigh.
And I sleep.
7 years Ago
The Quarantine Ward
“I don’t want to go in again. We flipped for it and you lost. You go.”
Pain screams through my face as their voices wake me from another nightmare. But blinking my eyes open doesn’t make it any better. Maybe this is the nightmare and I’m still not awake. Please gods, let this all just be one long nightmare and let me wake up.
But I don’t wake. Because this is real. The pain, oh fuck, the pain. How did I even sleep as long as I did through this?
It’s all real. Half my face is gone. Chewed away by flesh-eating bacteria. My life is gone. And she hasn’t come to visit once in the month I’ve been here. Does she know what happened to me? Then again, why would they tell her? They were trying to get rid of me and they did a spectacular fucking job.
Quarantine plastic surrounds my hospital bed. I can just make out the shape of the two nurses beyond, and then one finally lifts a flap and slips through.
She’s covered in a blue suit, face mask, and thick hospital gloves as she approaches cautiously. “Mr. Wulfe. How are we doing today?” Her falsely cheerful voice is grating.
I don’t answer her asinine question. How the fuck does she think we are?
“Time to change your bandage.”
That has me alert. “No,” I manage to grunt out even though I immediately regret it because it pulls on my destroyed cheek and sends a fresh hell of blinding pain throughout my body.
That’s the thing I didn’t know about pain. The wound is just in my head but nerves are a strange thing. They seem to connect all over my body. And so the pain shoots everywhere. My face is on fire but I’ll feel the pain in my belly. It curls me over into the fetal position.