Joseph

 

 

 

She lets a few moments pass before she moves away from the door. I turn the knob and push it open carefully, in case she’s still standing close to it.

I find her standing in the middle of the room, naked and distraught, with new tears mixing with the dried-up bloody mess on her cheeks.

A violent cry escapes from her chest when I hurry toward her, wrapping my arms around her small body, as I pull her in for a heartfelt embrace.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper in her ear, while she cries in my arms.

“You said you’d never hurt me,” she whimpers. “You promised.”

I close my eyes, my chest heavy with pain as I’m confronted with her agony.

“You have no idea how sorry I am,” I repeat. “For everything.”

She buries her face in my chest, shaken by brutal sobs as I lift her up and carry her out of the room. Her crying intensifies when she realizes that I’m removing her from the attic, the place she thinks she deserves to be right now.

“You’ve been punished enough,” I tell her as I carry her down the hallway. “My pet.”

Her gaze wanders up to me, searching for clarification.

“You’re not sending me away?” she asks, hope shining through every syllable of her question.

I shake my head.

“You’re insane, crazy, twisted,” I tell her. “But you’re my crazy pet.”

I set her down to open the door to her bathroom. “Let’s clean you up.”

She sniffs and nods, looking so insanely vulnerable and exhausted that I’m overwhelmed with the urge to protect her. No one, especially me, should ever be allowed to make her feel like this. It angers me to know how she’s been treated by other men before, her father, her ex-boyfriend. They don’t even deserve to breathe the same air as her.

I draw her a bath, and as I reach over to start the water, she gasps in shock next to me.

“Your hand!” she exclaims. “It looks terrible. You need to see a doctor!”

I hadn’t even noticed the blood on my knuckles, it only caught my eye when I left traces of it on her beautiful face.

She takes my hand, carefully pulling it closer to her so she can inspect the damage I’ve done to myself.

“It’s nothing,” I say, trying to downplay the extent of the injury. “It doesn’t even hurt.”

She furrows her eyebrows as she looks up at me.

“Where’s your medical kit?” she wants to know.

I sigh. “I will take care of it. Don’t worry about it.”

“Please,” she begs. “It’s my fault this happened. If you deny me taking care of you, it’d feel like another punishment.”

She pauses, her face turning to a focused expression as she contemplates her next move.

“You’d hurt me,” she adds. “Not allowing me to take care of you would seriously hurt me.”

She can’t hide a little smirk on her face when she’s speaking those words to me.

“Little minx,” I say. “You know you can’t play that card every time you want something from me.”

Her face changes to a disarming smile as she bats her eyes at me. “But could I today?”

I’m defenseless against her charm and let her do as she wishes. She bandages my hand while we’re soaking in the bathtub together. Now that the adrenaline rush is over, I can feel the mundane but stinging pain on my knuckles as she doctors the wounds.

I watch her as the water plays around the curves of her breasts. Just the picture of her, naked and focused as she tends to me, is enough for my cock to crave her. She smiles when she notices my hardness jutting against her thigh.

“Even after all of this?” she asks, winking at me.

“I can’t help it,” I say. “With such a beautiful pet right in front of me.”

She fixates her attention on the bandage around my hand.

“All done,” she says, moving my hand to the side of the tub. “Keep it out of the water.”

I smile at her, struggling to believe that she’s still here. Only a few hours have passed since I learned that she was not the woman I had planned to kidnap.

I really kidnapped her, I took her from her life, when she had absolutely no idea that this would happen to her.

That’s why everything with her has felt so real from the get-go. Because it was real.

She was a real victim to my twisted needs. And yet, she’s still here. She still wants to be here, just as I want her to be here.

But that doesn’t change the facts we’ve tried to ignore until now.

“People must be looking for you,” I say. “Your friends, your family. If we turn on the news, we might even see you there.”

She curves her lips into a sad smile.

“I don’t have many friends here,” she says. “Most of them were his friends, we always hung out together, and I never bothered to make my own friends since I moved here. But yeah, I guess work will miss me, and they probably informed my mother.”

“You will have to let them know that you’re okay,” I tell her.

She nods in agreement. “I know I have to.”

“And you need to tell them something about where you were,” I add, feeling a heavy lump in my throat as I’m overcome with guilt.

“I’ll come up with something,” she says, as her hands absentmindedly wander below the surface of the water until she finds my cock.

I sigh when she wraps her hand around it, slowly massaging my length by applying and releasing pressure in turns.

“My life had been pretty bleak in the days leading up to you,” she says in a low voice, without stopping what she’s doing. “I can always blame it on that. Say things got too much for me and I needed a break from everything, a little retreat, a hiatus from life.”

Her eyes find mine, locking onto my gaze as her lips part in an alluring motion.

“Is that why you were at that bar that night?” I ask her. “To drown your sorrows?”

She nods. “Yes, I guess you could say that.”

“And what made you steal that coat?” I want to know.

Her eyelashes flutter, while her mouth tips into a coy smile.

“Maybe I knew it would lead me to you.”