I AM WALLOWING IN MY misery. Yes, wallowing, because I see now Ellie will never be able to forgive me. I took it too far and ruined any small chance I had with her.
I won’t beg her to stay when she walks into this room and demands to go home. I won’t crack or crumble until she’s gone. I did this. And I’ll face the consequences. My heart sinks a little further. Tomorrow, I’ll disappear. Go so deep undercover that I’ll forget this life, and any other life ever existed, and hopefully one day forget Ellie exists, too. Because the memory of her will slowly destroy me. Like it is now. She’ll never understand the effect of those few precious weeks. How she changed me. How I loved her. Love her.
I hear the front door creak open, and my insides petrify. I can’t allow myself to feel anything or I’ll never survive her leaving again. I’m on the brink of a meltdown already.
“Hi,” she says unsurely as she stands in the darkness on the edge of the room.
“Hi,” I respond desolately.
The silence stretches for a long time before Ellie takes a deep breath and crosses the living room to where I’m sitting on the couch, the moonlight spilling through the windows highlighting her slim body and bare feet.
“Can I sit?” she asks, fiddling with her fingers nervously.
I gaze up at her with just my eyes, hoping she sees a steely look instead of a dying man.
“Of course.”
Ellie climbs onto the couch, tucking her legs underneath her, sitting much closer than I expect.
“Kayne, I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I ask floored. The last thing I expected from Ellie was an apology.
“For getting upset and throwing wine at you. I think I was harboring some residual anger.”
I actually laugh. “Ellie, you have nothing to be sorry for. I deserved it. That, and so much more. I just wish . . .” I swallow the emotion that’s trying to choke me. “ . . . I just wish you could find a way to forgive me.”
“Forgive you? I forgave you a long time ago. Trust is the problem. I trusted you.” Her voice strains and my heart twists. “After everything you put me through, I still trusted you, and then you betrayed me. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. First, you were one person, then you were another, and then you were someone entirely different. I felt so used. So humiliated. So stupid.” Angry tears start to well in her eyes. It’s clear she had already been crying from her smudged mascara, and here she is about to do it again. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make her smile as much as I’ve made her cry.
“Ellie, I’m sorry.” I try to reach for her, but she pushes me away.
“Please let me finish. You were right when you said I liked being yours.” It sounds like that was very hard to admit. “And after you pulled the rug out from under me, I hated myself for it. I hated you. I was ready to give up everything for you. I was content,” she says tormented.
I have no idea how to respond to that, so I just apologize again. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she snaps frustrated. “Just tell me why. Why did you feel the need to take it to such an extreme?”
“Why did I need to take it to such an extreme?” I repeat her question, running through the thousands of answers I had come up with over the last year because I knew this conversation was inevitable. “Part necessity, part appearance, part selfish desire,” I answer truthfully. Because right now, the truth is all I have to give.
Ellie looks at me confounded.
“I didn’t know you’d become so important in such a short amount of time.” Now I’m the one who sounds tormented.
“What?” She shakes her head not understanding.
“Those few hours sitting together on the couch during Mark’s party.” I start to recount. “Talking, laughing, flirting. I didn’t want the night to end, and I never wanted to let you go. But my life was so complicated, I wasn’t sure how much I could give. Then Javier showed up and everything spun out of control. I knew what he was capable of, I’d seen it firsthand.”
I tighten my fists from the traumatic memories.
“Women, so many women . . .” I get a headache just thinking about it. “Crawling around the floor like animals. Stuffed into cages so small they were hunched in a ball, all of them starved and abused.”
“What? Why?” Ellie asks horrified.
“Money. Some of them were for his personal use. Most were to be sold off as sex slaves.” Ellie turns pale. The light may be dim in the room, but the color of her skin unmistakable. “But that’s not the worst part,” I continue, on a mission to make her understand. “I visited his home once. Three months before he came to the States. While I was there, he made a habit of abusing one of them nightly. Screams . . . all night I heard them scream, like he wanted to make a point. He wanted me to know exactly who I was dealing with, and unfortunately, he made an impression. I’ll never deny it. The sounds still haunt me.
“But the last night was the worst. God, what he put that poor girl through.” I still get sick thinking about it. “She screamed for hours until I finally couldn’t take it anymore. If there was ever a time I was going to chuck it all, it was that moment. But just as I was about to leave my room and go on a murderous rampage slash suicide mission, it all stopped. A little while later, I heard digging in the backyard. That’s when I saw her, lying dead on the ground, mutilated beyond recognition. Her bloody and contorted body looked like a prop in a horror movie. She almost didn’t even seem real. I watched sickly while one of his thugs dug her shallow grave.”
Ellie turns from white to green. That’s the right reaction; I nearly puked just retelling the story myself.
“That night I vowed that girl’s death wouldn’t be in vain. Her blood will always be on my hands because I did nothing to stop him. I will have to live with that until the day I die. It’s also why I was so hell-bent on not blowing my cover. Why I went to such an extreme. There was so much riding on that operation, so many lives at stake. Including yours.
“When Javier said he wanted you, all I could see was your face next to that grave. He had to believe that you were mine. He had to believe that I was taking a page from his book. It was the only way to keep him away.”
“He didn’t stay away.” Angry tears fall.
“I know.” I cup her cheek in my hand. “And I’m sorry. I did my best to protect you. But he got what he deserved. He’s dead. And I swear to God, Ellie, I would have killed him right there in front of you that night if it were under any other circumstances. I swear. Everything would have been different.” I wipe away the wetness on her face. “I didn’t know how serious he was when he said he wanted you. If I made you disappear, it might have looked suspicious, and possibly blown my cover. If I did nothing, I ran the risk of Javier pursuing you. The only thing I was truly sure of is that somehow you’d become more important to me than my own life. I’d fallen in love with you and didn’t even know it. Or maybe I did and just didn’t know how to recognize it. Either way, I made a split-second decision and claimed you before he could.”
She clutches my wrist as she listens to me speak, like it’s anchoring her to the ground. I know it’s anchoring me.
“I just wanted to do what I thought was right for everyone. It may have been deceitful, and felt like I misled you, but it delivered the outcome I was hoping for. So, please tell me, Ellie, now that you know everything, which is the bigger betrayal? Handing you over to the monster so you could die, or becoming the monster so you could live?”
Not a peep leaves Ellie’s mouth, not even a flow of air.
“What happened to the other girls? Did you save them?” She finally blinks, causing more tears to fall.
“Yes. Seventeen of them. And Javier’s house was burned to the ground.”
“Good.” She wipes her eyes roughly with the tips of her fingers. When she’s finished, I take her hand and lick up every last drop of her tears. She watches me thoughtfully, as if being reminded of a memory. They taste the same now as they did then, salty and sad.
“Did you like doing all those things to me?” She sniffs. “Hurting me? Making me cry?”
I pause, breathing heavily. “That’s a complicated answer.”
“Why?” She looks at me so intensely, like she wants to pick me apart.
“Because . . . I did.” I lower her hand and tangle her fingers with mine. “But I wish we did those things under different circumstances.”
“What kind of different circumstances?” She’s enthralled now.
“Ellie, the only women I have ever been with have been submissive. They expected certain treatment, and I expected certain behavior. Spanking, whipping, and punishment is what we were both accustomed to. You, as far as I was aware, knew nothing of the sort so I had to teach you. If you were going to truly be my slave, you needed to act a certain way, portray a certain persona. And you did. You surprised everyone, especially me. You endured everything I threw at you, facing it head on. I never forced a woman before. To be honest, I didn’t even know if I had it in me. But being with you was like a drug, I couldn’t stop myself from pushing you, wanting to find out just how far I could go. How far you would go.”
“You pushed me pretty far.” She admits.
“You pushed me pretty far, too.”
“I did?”
“Yes. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
“And you would want that with me again? To be submissive?” Her tone tells me she doesn’t like that idea, but the question opens all kinds of promise.
“I told you that I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give me. I’ve made peace with giving up that lifestyle. You’re what’s important.”
“What happened to kink being king in your world?”
“That world doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You expect me to believe you’re okay with walking away from everything you know just so we can be together?”
I nod, confidently.
I can see the indecisiveness in her smoky-green eyes. The ones I’ve gotten lost in so many times. “I’ve never had love in my life, Ellie. Never thought I wanted it or needed it, or even deserved it. Then I met you, and everything changed. I don’t know how or why, I just knew you were different.
“I know I can’t force you to love me. I just thought if I could make you see me, see that I’m not the monster you think I am, maybe there could still be a chance.” I pull her closer so her body is pressed up against mine. She feels so good and so perfect, I pray to God I’m saying the right things to convince her to say. “I want you in my life,” I plead with her. “You just need to be brave enough to want me back.”
She takes a long deep breath, clearly battling with the demons inside her.
“I don’t want to go,” she expels softly. “But it’s going to be hard to trust you again.”
Hope swells inside of me. “We’ll take it slow. We have this place for two weeks. We can spend it getting to know each other. No pressure.”
Ellie just flicks the collar of my shirt thoughtfully, not agreeing to anything. That tiny bit of hope rising inside me suddenly becomes a violent cyclone of water escaping down a drain.
“I ruined your shirt,” she says.
“I don’t give two shits about my shirt.” I grab her, straddling her legs over my lap, serious now. “You can get mad, scream, hit me, beat me, torture me if you want. I’ll endure it all if it means you’ll stay.” I hold onto her hips tightly, vulnerability seeping out of every pore in my body. “I don’t think I can survive another day without you in my life.”
She stares deeply into my eyes with her hands resting on my chest, so wrackingly quiet.
“Please,” I beg. Yes, me. I beg.
“Okay.” Her response is so soft I barely hear it.
“Okay?” I repeat just to make sure I didn’t dream it.
“Okay. I’ll stay.”
“Really?”
Ellie cracks a smile. “Yes, really. But we go slowly.”
“I can do slow.” Yeah, right. But I’ll try.
Ellie brushes her hands over my chest, separating my shirt. I unbuttoned it with the intention of changing, but I never made it past the couch or the last two buttons. I struggle to sit still while she reacquaints herself with my body, running her palms over my skin and stopping at my tattoo. She always was fascinated by the large colorful compass over my heart.
“Look hard,” I tell her.
“At what?”
“The ink.”
She stares at the tattoo, then gasps. Written in very tiny script is her name on the needle pointing North.
“You’re crazy.”
“Without a doubt,” I chuckle.
Her expression softens as she rubs the tip of her finger over her name. I have no control over what happens next. She feels so fucking good straddled on top of me, touching me the way she is. I tuck a piece of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail behind her ear and the contact is magnetic. I lean forward, starving for just one tiny taste. She allows me to brush my lips against hers, never closing her eyes. I do it again, our gazes still locked. The third time, I apply more pressure, wrapping my arm around her waist. She kisses me back with just as much ferocity as this afternoon, and soon our slow, simple act becomes passionately charged.
I slide my hands eagerly under her dress and palm her ass while I swipe my tongue between her lips. She opens her mouth, allowing me in while simultaneously wrapping her arms around my neck. I crush her down against my erection, the two of us moaning as our hips clash together. With my heart starting to race, I slip my thumb under the silky material of her thong desperate to play with her, tickle her, lick her, fuck her. All the things she dangled in front of my face earlier tonight. Just as I begin to massage small circles over her folds, eager to sink my finger into the wet heat I’ve been dreaming about for the last twelve months, Ellie grabs my wrist.
“Kayne, no.”
“No?” I halt. “Why no?” I test the waters by trying to move my hand.
Ellie pants. “Because I need to know that no is an option.” She rests her forehead against mine.
“Of course, it is. I never want to take anything away from you. Ever again. I want to give you everything. Make you happy any way I can.” I look up at her. “I would lie, cheat, steal, kill to keep you happy, Ellie. I would kill for you.” I grab her neck. “I meant it then, and I mean it even more now. I would kill for you.” I stress the words, caught up in her penetrating stare.
With a small smile, she drops a kiss on my lips. “Tonight,” she breathes, “I need you to just lay with me.”