We go downstairs naked and I light a fire in the fireplace. While Grace looks through my DVD’s with a gray throw draped over her shoulders, I heat up the four-course dinner we never ate last night.

“Do you speak all these languages?” she asks, shuffling through the foreign film case.

“No, but I’m amazing at reading subtitles,” I say.

She smiles. I can count on one hand the times she’s smiled at me, and almost all have been tonight. Each one is so different, and so fucking beautiful.

I pop open a bottle of wine, fill two glasses, and set them on the coffee table. I watch her as she unwraps Miriam’s gift basket, lips pressed together with concentration as she peels back the cellophane. The throw slips off one shoulder, revealing the gorgeous constellation of bruises on her ass. My bruises. My ass.

Two weeks ago she lay unconscious on my rug. I wasn’t sure she’d wake up again. To see her here tonight, radiant and alive, is a dream.

We sit on the floor with our backs against the couch and eat from plates on our laps. Beef tenderloin, grilled shrimp, roasted vegetables, linguine. We share a chocolate torte that I pile high with ice cream, and even though I can’t find any candles, Grace sings.

Happy birthday, dear Bram.

She sits cross-legged with her back straight and her pretty tits exposed. Her voice is soft and a little nervous, and she hits one note a little off-key. It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard. The craziest and best birthday I’ve ever had.

“I wish I had a present for you,” she says.

“You do,” I say. “It’s downstairs.”

“There’s a downstairs?”

“Oh, yes. The red devil’s lair.”

She smiles again, and even though there’s a still a hint of exhaustion in it, I’ve never seen her look happier. Maybe I never wanted to train her, or ease my guilt. Maybe I always just wanted this. To banish her sadness, and make her happy again.

“The red devil’s lair?” she says, licking a smear of frosting from her finger. “You’re kidding.”

I stand up and put out my hand. “No, my little angel. Let me show you.”

She pads down the stairs behind me in her bare feet. I can hear her sweet breathing as she tries to keep up with my long-legged stride. For the last two hours, it’s almost been too easy between us. And she’s too smart. She’s figuring out who I am. She knows that, with me, every ray of sunshine is followed by a thunderstorm.

The hall lights are still set low from the night I found Grace in my yard. I lead her to the door at the end and stop. I let her feel how close and claustrophobic it is here, with no windows and only one way out.

I know this is a risk. I might trigger her just as I’m gaining her trust. But I have to show her. I need to see her here.

“Only a few people have been in this room before,” I say, pressing my thumb to the sensor on the wall. The door clicks open.

She pulls the throw around her chest and peers inside.

“Follow me,” I say. With a brave little breath, she steps into the darkness behind me. A light springs on overhead, illuminating the room in a sudden sweep of brightness. But I’m not looking at the room, or what’s in it. I’m looking at her.

She stops breathing and her eyes widen. “What is this?”

“My favorite place in the world,” I say. “My collection.”

Shivers rise on her arms as she glances from wall to shelf to glass case. Her spine shudders. She’s surrounded by instruments of death, each more beautiful than the last.

“But…why? Because you liked shooting in the woods?”

Her sweet question makes me laugh. “It’s been a passion since my grandfather gave me his rifle and knife. They’re over there.”

She follows the tilt of my head to the case displaying my most valued treasures. Her eyes flicker over the serrated blade of the knife and the scratched and battered rifle. The tremble of her shoulders makes my cock swell.

To see such a fragile girl surrounded by so much deadly power is intoxicating.

“He was a soldier?” she asks.

“A soldier and a prisoner of war. He didn’t have it easy, even after the war. He never had much money.”

“He’d be proud of you, I’m sure.”

Those simple words bring fucking tears to my eyes. She glances up just as I turn away, but she knows.

“You miss him,” she says.

“Yeah.”

I go to the case and slide the door open. Picking up the knife, I hold it in a beam of light. “He killed three guys with this when he was on watch one night. His rifle jammed and it was all he had. It was pitch black in the jungle. Hand to hand combat. He got a purple heart for it.”

Her lips are parted as she listens. She looks fascinated. “It’s amazing he escaped.”

“He didn’t,” I say. “There was a fourth soldier who took him prisoner. He was in a bamboo cell for three years.”

“Oh, Bram,” she says, slowly shaking her head. “My God.”

“Pretty intense,” I say. I hold the knife out flat on the palm of my hand. “Have you ever touched something like this before?”

She shakes her head. Her eyes are round and nervous.

“It was decommissioned by the military because it was considered too brutal.”

I pick it up by the blade and hand it to her. Reluctantly, she takes the thick black handle. The knife looks huge in her slender hand.

“It’s heavy,” she says. “Is it still sharp?”

I step close to her. She holds the knife away from her body as if it might explode.

“Find out,” I say, and turn up my wrist. Her pupils are huge as I take her hand and bring the knife down. The blade rests coldly against my skin.

She looks down at my crisscrossed veins and the chain tattoo winding up my arm. “Bram, please.”

“One cut and I’d be on my knees bleeding. If you were fast enough, you could cut the other wrist before I knew what was happening.” Her pulse pounds under my fingers.

“If you were on your knees, why wouldn’t I just cut your throat instead?”

Though her words sound confident, her voice is as soft and unsure as a child’s. She’s beautiful, such a contradiction.

“You’re learning.”

“What am I learning?”

“To protect yourself. To exploit your opponent’s faults.”

“What are your faults?” she asks.

“Simple. I want you so fucking much it makes me crazy.” I try to press the knife down but she resists with all her strength.

“What’s wrong?” I say. “I thought you believed in vengeance. An eye for an eye.”

“I do. I mean…I don’t know anymore.”

With a smooth, practiced motion, I take the knife from her and spin her around. Arm belted around her shoulders, I yank her against me and raise the knife where she can see it. She freezes like a terrified bird.

“In our arrangement,” I say, “one of us has to win. If it isn’t you, it’s going to be me.”

She drops her head back and looks up at me with glittering eyes. “Why can’t we both lose?”

Her lips are parted, and so fucking kissable I groan. Lowering my head, I plunder her sweet mouth with my tongue. She tastes like chocolate and fucking.

Her lips are so soft, full, and wet. She kisses me with abandon, like a horny teenage girl who’s never kissed a boy before. Reaching back, she hooks her arms around my neck, bringing my mouth down hard on hers. Her breath pants in and out and I can hear her heartbeat.

“Does this scare you?” I ask against her lips. “This room? These weapons?”

“Yes.”

“Because it makes me seem violent?”

“No,” she says. “Because I like it.”

She likes it. The thought makes my cock so painfully hard I lose all fucking control.

I step away from her and set the knife on a shelf. She’s a vision in that blanket with nothing underneath.

“So…where’s your birthday present?” she asks.

“It’s not something you can see,” I say. “It’s something you’re about to feel. Has a man ever eaten your cunt, pretty girl?”

She shrugs.

“In your fantasies, but not in real life. Isn’t that right?”

“Maybe,” she says, but she can’t hide her desperate need from me. Under all that shyness, her body’s on fire.

Taking her by the shoulders, I back her into a corner. “Move a muscle and you’ll spend two days leashed to your bed.”

She whimpers a protest, but doesn’t budge.

There’s a chair a few feet away – I yank it toward us and drop to my knees. Grabbing her slender ankle, I plant her foot on the leather seat. “Open,” I say.

She pulls her knee back an inch.

“I said open,” I bark, and push it roughly as wide as her leg will go.

Palms flat against the wall, she looks down at me. I pull the blanket from her shoulders and toss it aside.

Her bare cunt is right here. Mouth-level, parted, perfectly smooth. Her clit is tiny, barely visible under a pale pink hood, and her inner lips are already slick with excitement. With craving me. Her captor. The man she wanted to kill.

“You’ve never given this perfection to anyone before. Why?”

She bites her lip. “James didn’t want it.”

“You offered yourself to him and he refused?”

Shame darkens her face. “I once told him I wanted to wait until we got married. I changed my mind, but…he wouldn’t.”

Pure, unadulterated bullshit. James wasn’t religious. Something else was going on. Knowing him, it was underhanded and immoral.

No single man with a cock would pass up this beauty. The heady scent of it rises to my brain, making me feel pussy-drunk before I’ve even tasted her.

She gasps as I nip at her inner thigh. A bright bloom of redness appears on her glass-smooth skin. “Ouch,” she whispers.

I’ve never licked a virgin before. Never given a woman her first experience of hot and wet. She sucks in a breath as my mouth comes closer. She can feel my heat, and it scares her. But she wants it more than anything.

I kiss all around her cunt. Taking her other bare foot in my hand, I slide it over my huge, bare cock.

“You feel that?” I say, flicking my tongue over her left hip. “That’s what I’m going to fuck you with.”

Her hands tremble on my shoulders. A clear trickle of desire runs down the inside of her thigh.

“Are virgins always this wet and horny?” I ask.

“You’d know better than I would,” she pants.

“No, I wouldn’t. You’re my first.”

With that, I bury my tongue in her pussy. Her juices spill across my tongue, a sweet flood that makes me moan with joy. I’ve imagined this a hundred times, and now it’s happening. Grace and me. No ropes, no restraints, nothing keeping her here but her desire for me.

She bucks her hips from the sheer newness of the sensation. I hang on. Pushing her leg open even more, I drive my tongue up into her pussy and slip the tip in and out. A little preview of the massive cock to come.

God help me. I can’t wait to see her cry.

Not the way she did in the courtroom, but from pleasure so intense it shatters her. And changes her forever.

I suck her soft, slick wetness against my tongue. To hear her moan in this room makes me so hard I could come without touching myself.

I fill my mouth with her juices and stand up. Gripping her by the hair, I pull her face to mine. “Taste yourself. You’re so fucking delicious.”

Kissing her, I smear her sweetness across her mouth and chin. Her tongue flickers out curiously.

“Delicious, aren’t you?”

She gives me a tiny, intoxicating smile. “I like it.”

“See how wet you are?”

“Yes,” she says, wiping the corner of her mouth.

“Who made you that way?”

“You did,” she whispers.

“I did. What’s my name?”

“Bram.”

“I want you, Bram. Say it.”

“I want – I want you, Bram.”

Her words feel so good, like fucking music. My whole body aches with the need to fuck her.

“You want more, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, as I fall to my knees again. “Please.”

Circling my hands around her ass, I devour her pussy again. This time I focus on her clit, lapping the sensitive bud until her hands are knotted in my hair and she goes up on her toes.

How’s that have to escape thing going, Grace? I think with a smile. My tongue make you forget what a monster I am?

Her cunt pulses around my finger as I push one inside. Or try to. This is virgin territory, and even though it’s wet, it’s tighter than anything I’ve ever felt.

She murmurs something unintelligible as I force my finger in deeper. I circle it in her opening, preparing her for my cock as I lap her petal of a clit.

Wrapping her leg around my neck, she pulls me closer. Sucking, licking, I show her how much I’ve wanted her from the first day I laid eyes on her.

I’ll never forget seeing her in front of my house the morning after. She was standing in the street with her father and a police officer. Her face was contorted with grief. I watched her through the window, my heart breaking for her but my cock hard as steel. Something about her beautiful sadness made me want to fuck her until she started crying from pleasure.

That was the first time I wanted her, and it was sick and wrong. I tried to block out the memory, but I never could. I thought about it while driving, working, jerking off. It came to me in my dreams.

Dragging her hands through my hair, she holds me against her cunt.

“It’s so good,” she whispers. “Please don’t…don’t stop.”

I swallow a tongueful of her gorgeous juice. “Never.”

Finger twisting slowly into her cunt, I lap, lap again, and then stop. I look up to see her head rolled back and her eyes half-open. Her whole tiny cunt fits in my mouth. I feel so big and powerful in front of her, my kitten, my little moaning nymph.

“It hurts,” she whimpers as I push my middle finger to the second knuckle.

“Virgins are supposed to hurt.”

“But I like it, too. I like – I want –”

“What do you want?”

“I just – I love this. I shouldn’t love it.”

“Oh, Grace, you should love it. You’re just a girl. A beautiful girl who needs to come.”

I slide my finger out of her cunt and replace it with my tongue. I fuck her with it, giving her a little glimpse of how my cock will feel when I make her mine. When I ruin her for anybody else.

Her foot finds my cock again, rubbing and pressing my huge erection. It feels so good, the way she feels me with the sole of her foot, curious, a little clumsy, and desperately sweet.

She rocks her hips against my face. Gently slurping and sucking, I feel her go stiff. Her legs shake and her belly vibrates. I moan against her clit. My face, my neck, my hands are covered with her beautiful cream. I want to drown in it.

“Please,” she pants, as I give her my finger again. “Fuck me. Make me come.”

I push my finger all the way in just as she comes. This time, a helpless little scream escapes her. She explodes around me, her sweetness pulsing and squeezing and gushing silky wetness into my mouth. She’s so delicious I could live on her. I could drink her forever.

As her pussy relaxes, I pull her down to the floor. She’s wobbly and her skin is damp, and she’s smiling that beautiful smile.

I pull her against me and kiss her with pussy-flavored kisses, and she licks her wetness from my chin.

“You like your taste,” I say.

She blushes a little. “I guess I do.”

“I never knew virgins could be so uninhibited.”

“You’ve never been with a virgin before,” she says. “Or so you say.”

I raise my palm. “God’s honest truth.”

“How did you like your birthday present?” she asks, her face so earnest and real that I laugh.

“I loved it,” I say, draping the throw over her shoulders.

She smiles. “Funny how it felt like a present for me.”

On the way back upstairs, she stops at the doorway to the ballroom. “What’s in here?” she asks.

“Another room,” I say. I press the button on the wall. I watch her face as warm amber light floods the space.

Her face glows and her mouth opens. “Another room? Oh, Bram, it’s incredible.”

I smile at her girlish excitement. It’s like seeing my house for the first time as my eyes follow hers. Everything is big and grand and elegant, from the chandeliers to the stone staircase. The air almost hums with the memory of past parties. Parties that, in retrospect, seem empty without her.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “You could throw some amazing events here.”

“I used to, until –”

She looks at me, waiting for me to finish. She really doesn’t know.

“I stopped having parties two years ago. It didn’t feel right after what happened.”

“After James,” she says.

I let out a huff. “I’m sorry. You brought him up and now I have, too.”

“No,” she says, her eyes open and honest. “I’m glad. I’m glad you were…”

“Changed?” I say quietly.

She nods.

“I was, Grace. I always will be.”

We lapse into silence. Stepping into the ballroom, she looks up at the soaring ceiling. There’s a wistful longing in her eyes I’ve never seen before.

“You miss your job, don’t you?”

“I miss being good at something.”

“The way you talked about it at lunch today, you lit up. I could see that it’s your passion.”

“It is,” she says. “I guess I love…I don’t know. Vicarious happiness.”

Taking her shoulders, I turn her toward me. “Why did you quit? Because you didn’t want to see me? I had nothing to do with the bidding process for Phantom. I swear to you.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not why. It was a choice between Stephanie and me, and Stephanie deserved it. A few times I’d come to work after drinking…and my heart wasn’t in it. I always wanted to work for myself.”

I hear fierce ambition in her voice, but it’s muffled by everything she’s gone through. “Why don’t you?” I ask.

“I was starting to when –” She stops and forces a smile. “Maybe someday.”

“You can start a hell of a company with six and a half million dollars.”

“We’ll see if I can earn it first.”

Seeing her against the empty backdrop of so many gatherings, I feel a flash of guilt. For two weeks I’ve kept her from the world. Yes, I’ve protected her, and given her the structure she didn’t have. But she can’t go on living this way, trapped and isolated, letting her talents go to waste.

“I want you to plan a party,” I say.

Her eyes are dark with disbelief. “Don’t tease me.”

“I mean it, Grace. Plan it for a week from Saturday. Here, in this room. Can you do it?”

Her eyebrows knit together. “Nine days? How many people?”

“A hundred and fifty? Two-hundred?”

Her eyes brim with excitement and fear. “I’ve never planned such a big event by myself.”

“Then shouldn’t you?”

She hesitates. Doubt and confidence battle in her face. “I don’t know, Bram…”

“I do. I’ve gotten to know you over the last two weeks. I see how hard you try. I know how smart you are.”

“Thank you, but…” She looks around the room again, her pretty face bright. “I guess I should ask. What’s your budget?”

“Whatever you want it to be.”

She giggles, and it makes me smile. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous and true.”

Her smile fades, and her face takes on a sweetly professional look. “Well…what kind of party do you want?”

“A dinner party.”

“I mean, describe your perfect gathering.”

“No,” I say. “Describe yours.”

She lifts her eyebrows and puts a hand to her heart as if to say, me?

“I want your vision, Grace. Whatever you want. No limits.”

“No limits?” Her eyes fill with wicked delight. “Okay…off the top of my head? White candles in wall sconces. Blood-red roses. Naked servers in gold body paint.”

“I like this so far,” I say. “Go on.”

“Um…lute players. Long tables with ornate chairs. White fabric draped from the ceiling and columns.”

I take her hand. Her palm is damp from excitement. “It sounds like ancient Rome. How debauched you are, my wet little angel.”

Her blush is sexy and innocent. “I wasn’t until I came here.”

“Oh, but you were. You just didn’t have enough encouragement.”

Her face turns serious as she looks at me. “You’d really do this for me?”

“You’d be doing it for me. It’s a job, Grace.”

She shakes her head. “I won’t charge you for it.”

“Of course you will. You’ll charge me way too much and I’ll pay it. It can be the start to your new business. Will you say yes?”

She doesn’t answer. She just throws her arms around my neck and presses her warm, quivering body against mine.

Licking her pussy was beautiful, but this is my birthday present.