Anyone but me. I am not broken, holding his gaze even as tears blur my vision. I am not some sniffling little victim.
But he is still that man. That brooding, expressive Donatello. Even now, the look on his face robs me of the anger I’ve held onto. He should be shocked at the sight of me. Alarmed. Repentant. Fearful.
This man…
He’s hateful, his eyes blazing as his nail catches the corner of my mouth with a searing sting.
“Tell me your name,” he bellows. “Now. Tell me your fucking name!”
His eyes are unfocused, cutting lower to my throat. Without warning, he hooks his fingers beneath the thin straps of my dress, wrenching them down my shoulders before I even have the sense to stop him. I’m at the mercy of the cool air and his unyielding gaze, assaulted by both at once. My hands jerk in a vain attempt to shield myself, but the look in his eyes freezes me in place.
He shows me no mercy, eyeing my womanly body smugly as though the curves prove his next words true.
“You cannot be Safiya.”
Not the little stick of a girl he knew. His cucciola, his puppy, lovesick with devotion. In his mind, she never grew up.
His trembling finger continues his inspection, tracing my collarbone, and I flinch, my thoughts colliding. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
“You can’t be Safiya,” he says, laughing coldly to himself. “I wouldn’t want to fuck you if you were.”
To him, it’s perfect logic, emboldening him to cup my breast in the palm of his hand. Callously, he drags his thumb across my nipple, laughing harder as I stiffen.
“Ah, no, little tigre… Your game is up,” he declares, his smile breathtaking, wide with relief. “That girl meant the world to me. I’d know her…”
And yet he condemned her to a fate worse than death. He swallows hard at the realization, and his next stroke is harsher, making me jump. I can’t take my eyes off of him as he boldly gropes a part of me no other man has touched.
My brain tortures me with flashbacks of the man he used to be. Of us. Back when I was a useful toy to him. A silent little spy. No man has ever looked at me the way he does now.
Like I’m prey.
“No,” he growls, clenching his fingers around the globe of flesh in his grasp. “Tell me your name. Now. Tell me.” He lowers his mouth to my ear, letting his gruff rasp drip against the lobe. “Though it’s too late. I’ve already seen through your ruse. My little Safiya wouldn’t endure this treatment. Not from me.”
From him. The man she loved so innocently. Her protector. Her Donatello.
His touch would make her cringe. Resist. Fight. It would be wrong to endure the heat of his palm. To inhale his scent and remain still.
Still enough for him to press forward, muscling his bulk between my thighs, utilizing his weight like a battering ram.
“No, little tigre,” he murmurs, letting his lips graze my jaw. “You almost had me fooled.” He repeats it ceaselessly, as if hearing it out loud reassures him where his eyes do not. He doesn’t take them off me, peering into me with increasing confusion.
My lips part as his thumb rasps over my nipple. Again. Harder. Harsher. A sharp inhalation catches in my throat, the sound alarmingly loud in the quiet.
“Don’t tell me this arouses you, tigre,” he scolds. His opposite fingers sink into my hair, fisting a handful to lock me in place. “You like it rough?” He flexes his fingers, teasing me with the tips of each nail.
My heart races, surging, pounding against my ribcage. That faint taste of fear grows more potent. Run, a part of me warns. My brain issues a string of commands to my paralyzed limbs, but they don’t budge.
“Your employer must have paid well to acquire someone so determined. You have grit; I will tell you that,” he says, withdrawing his hand to stroke my other breast. The light touch proceeds the moment he catches the entire globe in a grip so tight my teeth chatter. “What was the deal, huh? You seduce me if you couldn’t kill me?” He chuckles and withdraws his hand, using the tip of a finger to caress over my nipple so intimately my cheeks flush.
It’s the surrealness that addles my senses, sending my thoughts into turmoil. Before my eyes, this man melds into an amalgamation of the caring figure who used to tuck me in at night. And a creature eyeing me with an emotion that makes my breathing hitch. It’s the way Mischa looks at his wife in the shelter of darkness when he thinks they’re alone and concern for the children no longer tempers his actions.
Hunger. Fire. Lust.
“You’re blushing, tigre,” Donatello warns, tilting his head so he can better observe my mouth. “Tell me your name. You’ve excelled at your act until now. Give me your name.”
He clamps down on my breast and tugs, pulling me toward him. Heat floods my belly. Disgust…
“Perhaps you don’t want our game to end?” he suggests, running his tongue along his lower lip. Switching to Italian, he says, “Tell me your name. I’d fuck you senseless if that’s what you want. Just give me your name.”
Anger flashes through his gaze at my silence. He palms the armrests again, and the furniture creaks as he leans forward, bringing his nose within a hair’s width of mine.
“Perhaps your aim is to drive me insane?” he wonders, letting his breath baste my cheek. “Fuck. It breaks my heart to tell you this, tigre, but I’m already there. I lost my mind years ago. You think to torment me? I live in torment.”
His large hands move to my waist, grasping at the skirt of my dress. Grunting, he tugs. Cold air assaults the flesh of my stomach before I even process what he’s done—rip my dress open, baring my front fully to him.
His irises look blacker in the dim lighting, adding a harshness to his features the man in my memories lacked. He’s a stranger, hunched over me. A stranger who smells like home and feels so familiar my body is a slave to the contours of his fingers, unable to sense the danger in them my brain is all too aware of.
His hands find my hips, so large they nearly overlap as he lifts me from the chair and shoves me onto the desk nearby. Limp, I fall back, forced to stare up at him, still trying to reconcile this man with the specter who has haunted me all this time.
Donatello, the man whose face I used to fall asleep picturing while imagining all the ways I’d kill him. Get my revenge. Make him regret leaving me. Forgetting me. Erasing me.
In this moment, those childish fantasies die. The little girl who conjured them is forced to grow up, faced with the ravages of time.
“Now, this is a skill I’m sure your employer won’t approve of,” he scolds, fanning out his fingers over my waist. The touch distracts me from his words, and I shiver as his thumbs toy with the waistband of my panties, threatening to slip beneath the thin lace.
“Pity,” he continues in a harsh tone that doesn’t match the unsteadiness apparent in his trembling fingertips. “How can someone like you feel pity for a poor bastard like me? Don’t deny it. It’s written all over your face. You may hold your tongue, but your eyes…” He inhales sharply as if tasting the word, relishing the flavor of it. My eyes. He might as well be drooling over my soul. “Those eyes give you away. I see you clearly. In every way, I see you.”
He sounds so earnest. He truly believes that, every word… While the truth’s twisted irony grows the longer he lets his touch linger over me. The more he looks. I think it’s the inherent wrongness that leaves me so riveted despite the indecency.