Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,278

let my arms drop to my sides, and when he swipes his thumb along my face and smears a tear across it, I let my lashes fall closed. He cups my face with both hands and pulls me closer.

“Look at me.”

I open my eyes and look up at him. He’s so close, I can see every speck of gold in his eyes and this, right now, it’s like I’m more naked than if he were to look over my body, if he were to lay me out and open me up and study every detail of me.

This is worse.

This… I can’t hold his gaze because this, now, him like this, it’s like he’s looking inside my soul.

And I’m letting him.

I blink, turn my face, meaning to look away, but turning it into his palm and for a single insane moment, I think I am safe here. Safe in his hands, in my enemy’s hands. I shake my head and with my arms, slap his off.

“You can’t have that,” I snap, more power in my voice than I thought I could muster.

He wipes his thumb on the corner of his mouth, like he’s wiping something away. Then his eyes narrow, and I’m back against the wall. I think he knows what I mean by ‘that’ even though I can hardly make sense of my own words.

You can’t have that.

He may be able to take my body, but he has no right to my soul.

I get the feeling he’s processing the same thing because he shrugs a shoulder and makes a point of looking me over slowly, as if letting his gaze memorize every inch of skin, the rise and fall of my breasts, the concave of my belly, the mound of my sex, the curve of my thighs, the fragility of my naked feet even.

“Turn around.”

I search his eyes, and they’re darker, the pupils dilated.

“Why do I have to ask everything twice?” he says.

I turn, and I realize the walls are not painted. They’re actually papered in a rich and very subtle paper with the most delicate pattern of roses repeating, repeating, repeating.

It’s what I concentrate on when I feel his fingers on me, when I gasp at the slight touch as he gathers up my hair and sets the mass of it over my shoulder to expose my back.

I find myself resting my forehead against the wall. I wonder if the ridges of the paper will imprint their pattern on my skin. I am suddenly tired.

He’s wearing me out, and he hasn’t even touched me yet. Hasn’t yet begun to use me.

His fingers play like a piano along my spine, tracing every vertebra as if with a feather, as if he’ll know every inch of me, every centimeter.

I set my fingertips on the wall, and I trace the pattern of the roses, none of which is bigger than the fingernail of my smallest finger, and they’re intertwining and suddenly overwhelming as they twist and turn their thorny, strangling stems again and again and again.

And I was wrong.

There is color.

I heard once that white contains all of the colors of the rainbow and thought what nonsense, but I see it now, in the roses that encircle this prison, my borrowed room.

I look up at it, rest the side of my cheek against the cool surface, and know there will be no reprieve, no break in the pattern. The roses are condemned to twist and turn and wind around and around and choke the life out of the next.

There will be no survivors. Not after this. Not after me.

My aunt’s ring seems to burn on my finger.

“I took from them.”

I look at it, meet the empty eye sockets on the tiny skull, and I know that it’s not just any bone, but Scafoni bone that makes up the ring.

I shudder at the icy chill that runs up my spine.

His ancestor’s bone is my jewelry, and I want to laugh.

But then he touches me, and inside my belly, a thousand butterflies take flight as his fingers brush my skin so lightly, it’s almost like he doesn’t. Like it’s my mind playing tricks on me.

I want to turn and look to be sure, but then he cups my bottom with both hands, as if weighing or testing, perhaps for his whip, and then with one hand he gathers up my hair and for the first time in my life, I curse the length, think maybe I should cut it short, shave it like a