Just as expected, those pretty blue saucer eyes of hers widened. “You really are insane,” she said again. “You nearly got us both killed then, and that was bad enough, but if anyone knew you were here…now…”
She seemed different.
Elaine seemed different.
Scared to a whole new tune. One I hadn’t seen in her before.
It was then that I looked beyond her to the coffee table next to her designer leather couch. It was then that I saw the concoction of sleeping pills and other bottles of meds waiting in a row next to a half-empty bottle of champagne.
And more…
A scrawled letter, complete with the fountain pen cast down at the side…
I headed close enough to investigate and picked up one of the bottles. Diazepam. A whole jar full of them that I shook in my hand.
“Going to bail out, were you?” I asked her. “This is how you’re planning on ditching your life, to save the Power brothers the effort?”
“It’s got fuck all to do with the Power brothers,” she said in a hard voice, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m doing what I want, because I want to.”
But she was lying. Just like always.
If she’d really, truly wanted to kill herself tonight she’d have done it instead of letting me up.
She didn’t want to kill herself. She wanted me.
She’d wanted me since she’d first set eyes on me at Tinsley Constantine’s ball.
We stared at each other, both of us sizzling with generations of family hate and vitriol. Both of us despising everything the other one stood for. Both of us knowing that anything other than malice between us was at odds with everything we stood for as human beings.
“Leave,” she told me, and this time her eyes flared with a new round of shame. “You can sleep happily tonight, knowing there’s one less Constantine in the world.”
“Very dramatic.”
“Thanks for that.” It was then that she noticed my bandaged hand. “What’s that? Get into a fight with some boardroom member. Is that it?”
I stepped up closer to her and breathed in her scent. “Why are you such a little fool?”
Her eyes were brimming with tears, even though her jaw was gritted tight. “Fuck you, Lucian. Fuck you, and fuck off. I don’t want anything the fuck to do with you, and never have.”
I backed her up into the wall, pinning her tight.
“Such a liar,” I snarled. “Such a dirty little liar. You can’t resist me. You’ve not been able to resist me since the first moment you laid eyes on me at your sister’s sad party.”
“Interesting accusation,” she said. “Considering you’re the one standing in my apartment, even though you’d be dead if anyone so much as got a sniff you were here.” I saw that flash of need in her eyes, and it was the one that set me on fire. The one that always set me on fire.
It was her masochistic need for hurt. The woman who wanted to suffer at my hands.
“Seriously,” she whispered. “Fuck off.”
“You’re really going to overdose over a debt to the Power brothers?”
She shrugged, squirming her body tight against mine. Her breaths were in my face, and her eyes were still glassy. Hurt. “I’m going to overdose because I want to. I’m done with the whole sorry state of my existence. What’s the point of it?”
I tugged her nightdress up around her thighs, and swallowed as I saw the beauty of the fresh slashes on her flesh. “An overdose would be such a waste.”
“Great, so I shouldn’t die because you want to fuck me?”
“Why not?” I asked with a cold laugh. “It’s as good a reason as any? But I can think of a better one. Stay alive because you want to fuck me.”
She shakes her head, half laughing, half crying. “You’re such a bastard.”
And that’s when I knew it, above anything else. The one thing I should’ve known right from the beginning when I’d very first caught sight of the woman in gold and that mysterious, irrational web of want she’d snared me with.
She wasn’t going to be slashing herself to pieces. I was going to be destroying her, one tiny petal at a time.
“You won’t be slashing yourself anywhere,” I told her and took her throat in my hands. “You’re coming with me tonight. Whether you want to or not.”
“You’re planning on kidnapping me from my city center apartment, sneaking me down past the eons of security staff and right onto the main street outside while the world is watching you? Good luck with that.”
I grinned right back at her. A grin that chilled her right to the bones. “I won’t be kidnapping you. You’ll be joining me very willingly. One last fuck before I let you go.”
That sparked something in her, some final flare of self-respect in that battered little heart of hers. “You’re an asshole. A motherfucker.” The word comes out tumbled from her lips. She isn’t used to insulting people. It’s almost endearing. “A goddamn terrible person.”
I kissed her once. Deeply. Nipping and tugging at her lips with my teeth.
I nipped her lower lip so hard she whimpered, even though she was struggling for air. I tasted her blood in my mouth as I pulled away.
It tasted fucking divine. Her blood. A delicacy I’d been hungry to taste for a long time.
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
I cast her aside and she fell to the floor, gasping for breath as I freed her throat. I strolled over to the table without giving a shit about the medication bottles. What I wanted was right next to them, the scrawled remnants of the letter she was in the midst of writing.
Tristan.
I should’ve known it would be Tristan featuring in her last goodbye.
“You’re good friends, huh?” I ask her.
“Fuck you.”
“He really likes you too, you know,” I told her. “He was prepared to stick his neck well and truly on the line to save you from my grasp the other night. He wouldn’t tell me where you were, not even if it cost him his life.”
“Good thing I was leaving him a letter then.”
I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and her eyes widened in the way I was coming to love too damn much to ignore.
“He’ll be getting a load more than a goodbye letter from you if you don’t join me down at the back of this building in fifteen minutes,” I told her. “If you take your own life up here, I’ll be taking his. If you tell anyone I’ve been here, I’ll be sure to make sure he’s dead within the hour.”
Oh, those pretty eyes of hers. Widening even further. “You can’t.”
But yes. Yes. This was the answer. This had always been the answer. Taking her as mine with no exit and no limits was the prize I’d been chasing right from the start, without even knowing it.
She was mine.
She’d always been mine, from the very moment I’d set my eyes on her, the woman in gold. “I’ll be outside,” I told her. “In the shadows to the right of the parking lot, under the rear awning. You’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“No,” she tried again, but it was weak. I didn’t even look behind me, just made my way out of her suite and back through her domain.