The Devil

Briar

I woke slowly when my door was thrown open. The sound of it slamming into the adjacent wall reverberated throughout the room, but I didn’t attempt to move from my curled-up position.

I didn’t have the strength to.

Other than the times the man had forced me to move that day in a vain attempt to eat, I had stayed right there, facing the wall.

I had wondered how long it would take my body to shut down from lack of nutrition, and I tried to figure out if it already was.

I hadn’t had anything Sunday morning before Kyle and I had been on our way out the door and had been abducted before I could take my lunch at work. I remembered being given one small cup of water while they’d prepped me for my buyer, but other than that, I hadn’t put anything in my stomach since Saturday night. I’d vaguely noticed that during all of my crying today, there hadn’t been any tears, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last used the restroom. I was just so tired.

Just as my eyes slid closed again, the man roughly forced me onto my back. It was easy to keep my eyes closed now—I wondered briefly if I could sleep through this attempt at giving me food.

A scratchy whimper of protest sounded in the back of my throat when he grabbed my sore wrists and yanked them high over my head. “Please let me go,” I whispered hoarsely as something smooth slid over one wrist . . . and then the other.

For a second, the material felt so nice that I wondered if he was doing something to heal my cuts, but then it tightened painfully and my hands were pulled higher until my shoulders were screaming in pain.

The tension eased momentarily, but when I tried to move my arms down again, I couldn’t.

I sluggishly leaned my head back on the bed and peeled my eyes open, but it took me a second to understand what I was seeing. My hands were tied to a wide section of the wooden headboard. I pulled harder with no give from the wood, and looked down, panic flooding me when the man opened my robe, exposing my body.

I pressed my legs together and tried to pull them up, to curl into as much of a ball as my position would allow, but the man gripped the tops of my thighs and slammed them back onto the bed, spreading them wide.

“No, no. No!” I screamed, and tried to thrash with what little energy I had left. “Please, no.”

“You are mine, do you understand that?” he seethed, and the muscles in his arms flexed as he held me down.

He was shirtless, and the jeans he’d been wearing throughout the day were unbuttoned and barely staying up. He was tall, with a broad chest and shoulders that tapered down to narrow hips. Every inch of him was tanned and muscled, but the scars and tattoos that littered his body didn’t seem to fit a man who bought kidnapped women.

They didn’t seem to belong to a man who spoke to me the way he did. They didn’t boast of his money or power.

They screamed he was dangerous. They screamed to run.

My head shook subtly as a sob burst from my chest. “No,” I whimpered.

His head snapped up then, and I froze as I got my first glimpse of this man.

He was younger than I’d thought. Maybe a few years older than me. His dark hair was cut short on the sides and longer on top, and looked as if he had been running his hand through it all day. His nose and jaw were strong, and the dark stubble that covered his face somehow highlighted his full lips that were in a sneer now. But his eyes—those dark eyes were as murderous as they were mesmerizing . . .

He was darkness.

He was my own personal demon sent from hell.

“No?” he asked. His voice held no emotion anymore. He released my legs and straightened his body as his strong hands moved to the zipper on his jeans. I shut my eyes and my jaw trembled when I felt the bed dip. “You can try to kill yourself, Blackbird; I will keep you alive. When I tell you to eat, you eat. Do you understand?”

“Please stop, please stop, please stop,” I begged as his hands grasped my thighs again so his denim-covered hips could settle between them, my voice growing louder with each word. “No, no. Stop!” I screamed when one of his hands trailed up to my hip, his grip tightening. “Stop!”

I squeezed my eyes harder, not wanting to see any part of this. This can’t be happening to me.

His other hand slowly moved to the inside of my thigh, my entire body now shaking with fear and hatred and disgust.

“I understand,” I yelled. “Just please stop. Don’t do this.”

His hand stilled, and seconds that felt like lifetimes of torture passed by before he released me and slowly covered my trembling body with his own. I flinched when his lips met my ear, but otherwise I didn’t move.

“I own you, Blackbird,” he said in a deceptively soothing voice.

I let my head fall away from him, and opened my eyes to stare at the same wall I’d looked at all day as I responded, “Never.”

His fingers gripped my face and forced me to look at him, and like before, he looked murderous. Beautiful and destructive.

I had been wrong. He wasn’t a demon. A demon wasn’t nearly as evil or dark as this man. My jaw shook under his tight grip, but I still managed to whisper, “The devil will never own me.”

That beautiful mouth curved into a wicked grin, and I hated it as much as I hated the man. Just before he pushed away from me and rose from the bed, he breathed, “We’ll see.”