grateful. “Thank you.”
The words slip from my mouth before I even realize it, and he stops and looks down at me for a moment to smile. It’s the most genuine smile I’ve seen on his face since I first met him, and it warms my heart.
“Don’t. Please, don’t,” he says, clearing his throat. “I don’t deserve that.”
“But you helped me remember,” I say, frowning.
His nostrils flare. “I did what I had to do to save you. That doesn’t make me a good guy.”
“I didn’t say you were.” My hand reaches to touch his face in a moment of pure need for love, even if it’s the wrong kind, but the look of suffering he gives makes me stop.
“Don’t,” he says. “Please, don’t. Don’t thank me.”
My hand inches back, and I swallow. “Sorry.”
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” he says, and he continues walking. “It’s that I don’t deserve it.”
He takes me to a door on the other side of the study, which leads straight into a bedroom. His room. The room I was never welcome in or invited into, one that was locked when I still had my privileges to roam about the house.
The oversized bed in the middle of the room is large enough to fit five people. The curtains in front of the window are already closed, but I can still check out the room because of the small light next to the bed. A black leather couch sits in the back next to a giant wardrobe and a mirror that spans the wall from top to bottom.
But I don’t have more time to look as Eli places me down on his bed, fierce protectiveness in his eyes as he lies down beside me and pulls the blanket over us. He wraps his arm around me and pulls me in closer until we’re spooning. Like we’re an actual couple.
But that doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t love me. We’re not together. He’s my captor, and I let him do this to me because I asked for it. Because I pleaded with him to punish me, and now I got my wish.
“Don’t think too much. You need to rest now,” he says, tucking me in tighter.
The warmth in his arms almost makes me forget who he is. Almost.
“I can’t. I can’t sleep after all this,” I say, trying to force myself to remain in the here and now and remember he is the bad guy, even when the lines are blurring.
“Then at least rest,” he replies with a stern voice.
“But I need to know more,” I say as I clutch the blankets that smell like him a little closer, afraid of what’ll happen if I admit that maybe, just maybe, I feel something for him. Not love … but adoration. And I know that isn’t right. I’m not supposed to feel these things for a man like him. My captor.
Especially when he knows so much about me. Things I didn’t even know myself.
Because Eli never told me why he knew what I’d done to Chris. Or how he got that knife.
I swallow hard. “I have questions.”
“What do you want to know?” he murmurs against my skin, the warmth of his breath almost distracting me enough not to want to ask.
I’m tired, so tired. Not just from fucking but from reliving the trauma I’ve tried so hard to keep buried. My eyes can barely stay open, yet I know I must hold on. No matter how hard they wish to close, no matter how hard my brain wishes to forget. I must know the truth that’s right in front of me.
All I need to do is ask.
“How … did you get that knife?”
The question hangs in the air for so long that it feels suspended in time. His body no longer feels warm against mine but cold to the bone, and I shiver in place.
“I found it in your home,” he says.
The words reverberate over and over in my mind.
In my home.
He was in my apartment.
He was there when it happened, that night.
My eyes are wide open. I’m awake. I’m fully aware.
Memories flood back into my mind of the day I found myself lost in the woods and stumbled back home, when I looked out the window and saw a man leave. He was leaving my apartment. Eli.
But why did he come to my apartment when we’d only met a couple of times before? Even if he knew where I lived, he couldn’t have possibly known what was going