“You’re… what?” she shrieked. Yes, right in his face.
“I’m binding you to me.”
“You’re… binding… me… to… you,” she repeated, enunciating each word with clear, open, horror.
He ignored her horror.
“Until you die.”
She tried to rear back.
His hand in her hair, his arm around her body and his strength that would make Hercules jealous made this effort moot.
So instead she whispered, “Oh my God.”
He ignored that too and stated, “You may have noticed you have no shoes.”
Sonia blinked yet again.
Then she nodded.
Callum continued immediately but on a different subject, “I’m going to finish outside, the storm is already here. They’re forecasting snow, maybe several feet. The electricity can go out here easily and the insulation isn’t the best. We need the fires. We could be snowed in by nightfall. I need to get us sorted.”
With that announcement, he stood, picking her up with him. Somewhere in her fogged, distracted, ravaged, oh-my-god-what’s-happening-to-me mind, she noted that no man had ever picked her up easily like that (or, at all) and held her to his chest like she weighed no more than a sack of feathers.
He turned and tucked her sideways back in the chair, her knees to her chest, the soles of her feet in the seat.
He leaned in and put a hand on either arm of the chair.
“You take some time, come to terms with what I’ve just said. If you have questions, we’ll talk more after lunch.”
She stared at his back as he walked through the cabin and out the backdoor.
Then she twisted her head to look out the front windows and saw that snow had started to fall.
Heavily.
Then she realized she’d not make it very far in a snowstorm without shoes even if she managed to escape.
And she had to escape.
Because she was stuck in a cabin with a murdering madman who thought she was his queen and intended to bind her to him until she died.
Then, to her shame, Sonia felt a single tear drop from her eye and trail down her cheek as her extreme fear overcame any courage she might have been able to muster.
That tear was joined by another.
Then another.
And then more.
Chapter Five
Mismatch
Callum finished splitting the logs and stacking them on the back porch in which he’d fitted the storm windows that morning while Sonia slept.
He was concerned about the storm. The snowfall was forecast as heavy and this could knock out the broadband and interfere with his cellular reception. Further, if anything should happen and he was needed, he didn’t want to be snowed into the cabin. He could transform and get out but Sonia couldn’t.