Chapter Twenty-One

Jacob

Where was Alana? This woman, this fucking Nila … she didn’t love me. She didn’t know me. Alana was buried so deep in there she wouldn’t come back out. I needed her. I had to know everything I had gone through, everything I’d suffered, was for something. I stumbled away from between her legs and left her tied to chair, covered in blood and cum, and ran to the kitchen.

“What a fucking mess. A fucking mess,” I said. Groaning, I sank into the chair at the table and rested my face in my hands. They smelled like her blood and my lust. Combined, perfect. Why couldn’t she see how well we fit together? How perfect we were? Why didn’t she pay me back? She should have been waiting for me. After everything I’d sacrificed, she should have been begging for my return, so fed up with a fucking normal life that she came alive under my hands. But she fucking didn’t.

“Eight years, and this is what I come back to. A broken woman who hides behind the mask of her darkness because she doesn’t know how to accept it. Won’t accept it.”

I refused to talk to Noel. Yeah, I’d used him against her, but it didn’t feel right to bring him out now. I was tarnishing his name.

I’d held on so long. Through everything. Through that fucking juvenile home for psychotic children. What a fucking joke. It was an orphanage filled with kids who took their hate, anger, and pain out on others. Who mimicked what they went through at home, or sick fantasies stuck in their heads, on others around them.

The memories rushed in, pushing through my barrier, ripping away at the cracked protection I had on my soul. I slammed my head to the kitchen table, over and over. As the pain grew, the memories faded. I wanted her. Needed her. She saved me from the darkness as much as I saved her.

Only to be turned away at the fucking gates.

No. No fucking way. I wasn’t going to lose everything and sink under all the pain I’d endured for her so she could go on in life without me. We either lived together or died by my hand. That fucking simple. If I had to kill her, I’d make sure I died with her, but she wasn’t going to be without me.

“Never. She owes me. Fucking owes me for loving her. For saving her. For giving her freedom when I was held prisoner. I traded fucking places with her.”

Standing, anger and resolve coursed through me. It was time she understood. Time she knew what she’d done to me. How she had no choice but to splay open her heart and give it to me. I deserved that. My mind raced as I headed back to her, grabbing a little something on the way and tucking it into my back pocket.

“Where’s the shower?”

“What?”

“You’re not hard of fucking hearing. Where is your shower?” My voice vibrated through the room, my anger at a boiling point.

“I don’t have one.”

“Liar. I’m going to pay you back for every lie, you know that? Your marks would die of infection if you didn’t have ways to clean them up or a doc on hand. Remember the doctor? The one who took Noel from you? He’d been working for my dad for years. When he was a young doctor, he killed a girl on his table. Botched abortion. A young woman pregnant with his child. His daughter.”

“Sick fuck,” Alana said harshly.

“Aren’t we all? Dad helped him clean it up, and in return, he helped Dad. Wouldn’t want anyone to know what he did. After a while, he was so wrapped up, telling would only give him an appointment with lethal injection. I took care of him, too, you know. Performed surgery without anesthesia until he was no more. Left him on his desk like that. You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Yeah, well I fucking did. No one was ever going to hurt you again, and if they ever had, they deserved it.”

“You are hurting me, Jacob.”

“No, I’m loving you. The only way fucked-up people like us can love. Now, where is your fucking shower?”

“You don’t love me, Jacob. You’re obsessed. You’re preoccupied with the idea of us, the love you’ve imagined we shared, and you can’t let it go. We kissed, Jacob, and we shared a bond people won’t understand, I’ll give you that, but it isn’t love.”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me with that bullshit. One last time, Alana. Where. Is. Your. Shower?”

“Let me go, Jacob. If it’s love, real love, you’d free me. Because you know what the cage does to me. I could never love someone who put me in one. Never.”

Her words were like daggers in my chest— sharp stilettos that burrowed into my lungs and deflated them. She stole my breath. Turned me inside out.

“Love or obsession,” I said as I walked toward her. “Either way, they both say you belong to me. And you, Nila, Alana, whoever you are today? That body and mind of yours knows it. You want to know why? You could have bitten my dick off if you wanted to. But you didn’t. You tortured me, punished me, but didn’t maim me. That connection, that moment of hesitation. Find our love there. And, hell, maybe obsession is what we’ll share.”

Her mouth opened on a sigh. She still hadn’t answered my question, though, and punishment was in order. I pulled my knife from my pocket and slit the ropes off her legs. Then I unstrapped her, gripping her collar to keep her in place. I forced her to stand up before I kicked her feet out from under her.

“Ah!”

Her scream was magical as she fell to the floor. Then I was dragging her, the sharp points of her collar starting to dig into her neck. She hollered at me, but I didn’t care. I allowed her to stick her fingers into the collar and hold some of the pricks away from her skin, but she couldn’t stop them all.

“We’re going on an adventure.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, you will. Trust me.”

I dragged her down the long hallway toward the entrance, knowing the shower wouldn’t be that way, but I proved my point. She’d be filthy, and each tug on the pole for her collar would be agony. She stayed stubbornly silent as I pulled her, but the way her chest rose and fell in rapid succession told me how badly it hurt.

“Over a hill we go.” I climbed up on the hood of her car and jerked her up with me before going down the other side.

“Damn, no shower here. To the next location. Maybe if I’m up high enough?”

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t expect her to. Fucking stubborn woman. I found my way to some stairs to the back—the ones I’d used to get into this place the first time—and yanked her up those. Her hip hit a rung hard enough to vibrate the metal and she whimpered. I steeled my heart from her pain. She needed to come back to me, I needed her to be Alana again. I’d do whatever I had to do to Nila to get her.

“Just … oh, I don’t know … twenty more to go?”

“Wait. I’ll tell you. Dammit, wait,” she said with a moan.

“What? I didn’t quite hear you.”

“On the other side of the warehouse, across from my car.”

“Good girl.”

I dragged her to the shower. She cursed me the whole way, but my point was made. Don’t answer my questions and it hurts. Answer me, and it can hurt in a good way—the way that would make her pussy weep for me. Those were the only two alternatives. The rules, so to speak. She understood all about rules.

I pushed through a door and found an open, tiled area. It was grungy, but it had four showerheads, locker-room style, poking from one wall. Once I was close enough to one, I saw she had plain soap and a rag there to be used. I ignored the rag, but the soap would work. Bracing her under the water, I turned on the hot and cold to adjust it.

“Too cold,” she said, but I ignored her. I would get it to a good temperature in a minute.

“If you weren’t such an ass, I’d have let you do this yourself. But since I can’t trust you to cooperate, you’ll deal with it.”

I didn’t leave it freezing though. She sighed as hotter water rushed over her, sluicing away the dirt, blood, and grime. She tilted her head back, and it ran over her face and hair. I was entranced by the water running over her features. The way her dry lips plumped and smoothed out under the water. How her eyelashes clumped together and looked darker. Every part of her was delicately formed, but I knew of the steel inside her. A perfect blend.

It was then I saw the cuffs embedded into the wall, a way to keep a prisoner held under the water. That would work. I stood her up and turned her into the spray before I cuffed her hands. Then I locked her ankles too.

“I can’t run with this thing on my neck, you know.”

I removed the pointed collar. She blinked before looking over her shoulder at me. I held her gaze as I dropped the collar and reached for my back pocket.

“Twenty-five,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

I let her barbed whip uncurl, the end falling loudly to the wet floor. “Twenty-five lashes for lying to me.”

“No. Fuck no. Don’t do this. It’ll ruin my body.”

“Nothing could ever ruin you. Each mark, every scar, is a badge you wear for the darkness inside of you. And each one is going to belong to me.”

“Jacob!”

“Say my name again.”

“Please.”

“Beg me and I’ll stop.” Her mouth clicked shut and she glared at me, murder in her eyes. “Then we will go ahead with the twenty-five, won’t we?”

I swung. She screamed, and the blood flowed.

Forgive me.