I’d never want to handle that shame and embarrassment in front of him, to have to explain why I saved him instead of turning him over to my family’s wrath.
“Push the fucking boundaries all you like. I’ll make you suffer for all of them. But believe me, you choose to use your pretty little tongue against the Morelli name, and I’ll cut the snark right out of you.”
I shut my mouth with a nod and carried on eating, but Lucian Morelli was lying to himself. There’s no way he’d cut my tongue from my mouth before he killed me—not when it played his cock so well. His defense of the Morelli family name felt different this time. More strained. As if he had bigger priorities than a feud that had consumed our families for decades.
Chapter Twelve
Lucian
Elaine was shaky as I forced her into her box that night. She was still naked, with those sweet tits on display. She was the perfect doll. She shot me a look from inside the room, big eyes fixing on mine with a please she didn’t say. Please don’t leave me here.
She didn’t want to be alone.
Part of me didn’t want to leave her alone. I wanted her next to me, subject to my every whim, whenever I wanted it. Still, I couldn’t share a bed with a Constantine. Or with my little doll. I couldn’t stoop that low, even by my current standards of jackass insanity.
“Make sure you sleep,” I told her. “I want that body perfect for me tomorrow.”
She didn’t reply, and no doubt the exhaustion won out in her. She slipped into bed and pulled the covers up high. She curled into a fetal position before I closed the door on her, and it was…strange. It gave me a weird feeling I couldn’t place. Almost like pain.
I shut the door firmly and headed away.
My bed was a large floating structure in the center of a large bedroom. I wanted Elaine to entertain me, but instead I made plans for her. Plans to hurt, stretch, push to the ultimate limit, and I jerked off to the thrill of all the good things to come.
Sleep found me then, as always, it found me.
Elaine was already awake when I set foot outside my room, showered and dressed the next morning. She was in the kitchen making herself a coffee like she owned the damn place. It gave me another one of those weird pricks of a feeling to see she had another mug waiting on the counter, ready to pour. One for me.
“Uncomfortable bed?” I asked her. “Be grateful I gave you one at all.”
“Most beds are uncomfortable to me,” she said, “I’ve had a lifetime of bad experiences, staring at the door, scared of who’s going to come in and climb on my bed.”
“I’ll be the one climbing on your damn bed.”
She cast a glance at my suit and the keys already in my hand. “Heading into the office? Should I be a good 1950s wife and cook green bean casserole while you’re gone?”
“No, sweetheart. You’re my little doll. And good little dolls move their limbs back and forth, they brush their hair, they shave the hair from their bodies so they’re smooth and ready.”
“Gross.” She poured me a coffee and held it out to me. “At least drink this before you hit the road. You hardly want to be driving without any caffeine in you.”
I stared at her puzzled, nothing short of shocked, because it couldn’t possibly…it couldn’t possibly be Elaine Constantine caring.
She seemed to register my confusion; it hit her as strangely as it hit me. Her justification was instant.
“It’s about your body, not you,” she said. “What’s going to happen to me if you get in a car crash and don’t come back? I’ll starve after a while. Fuck you, by the way.”
She went to take the coffee back, but I grabbed it from her. I’d been raised with solid manners, and they couldn’t hold back. The words were out of me before I could stop them. “Thank you.”
Elaine was taken aback by that too. I knew she was fighting the response, but we couldn’t stop it. Even in our hate, we couldn’t stop it. “You’re welcome,” she said with another shrug, then added the obligatory, “You’re welcome, asshole.”
“Have you any damn idea how ridiculously immature you sound when you use that term?” I asked her. “You sound like a rebellious child.” I downed my coffee. She’d done a good job of it.
“I’ll be wearing one of your shirts today,” she told me. “You can punish me for it when you get home all you want, but I’ll still be wearing it.”
There it was again, another ridiculous statement. Home. When you get home.
“When you get back,” she followed up, but it was too late.
“This isn’t my fucking home,” I said. “It’s a dungeon where I’m torturing you until you scream. Don’t for a second think I’m home here.”
“Torturing me until I scream? That’s all? What about blood and despair? What about torturing me until I black out? Don’t tell me you’re going soft in your old age.” She lifted her smirking jaw to me. My free hand shot to her exposed throat and fucking squeezed.
“Maybe you don’t deserve to black out.”
“Do it,” she choked out.
I let go of her throat and forced my fingers into her gasping mouth, shunted her backwards as she gargled her own spit and retched against me. Retched until it ran down her nostrils and her eyes watered as I twisted my fingers into her throat.
When I pulled my hand free, she doubled over, gasping as her drool puddled on the floor.
“Get that shit cleaned up before I get back,” I told her, only just resisting the urge to fuck her up some more.
“Whatever,” she said as I walked away and caught sight of the time on the clock above the counter, her voice hoarse.
Fucking hell, I was later than even I’d expected.
I was never late…not before Elaine Constantine became my little doll.
The car was waiting in the garage and so was the road ahead, all damn sixty minutes of it.
I knew what was looming—Seamus and Duncan and their lowlife attempts at kissing Father’s backside. They could go fuck themselves.
Sure enough they were hovering when I arrived in my office at Morelli Holdings. Seamus was on his phone trying to sound as slick and professional as possible, and Duncan was flicking through paperwork he had no right to be flicking through. I snatched it from him as soon as I was in reaching distance.
“Get the fuck out of my office.”
The man had the audacity to laugh at me. “It’s not your office. It’s your daddy’s. He knows we’re here this morning. He also knows you weren’t.”
Fuck’s sake.
“I’ll be handling my father,” I told them both with a snarl. “Believe me, you have no place here, and you’ll be getting the fuck out of my building.”
It was Seamus who laughed this time, dropping his phone onto my desk.
“You’d better go handle him then, shouldn’t you? He’s downstairs on floor nine.” He tutted like a prick. “Believe me, he’s not a happy daddy this morning.”
Somehow I knew the assholes were telling the goddamn truth and it was a ball ache. Under any normal circumstances I would’ve put it down to my own fucking around in Bishop’s Landing and not at Holdings where I belonged. And nothing else. My fucking bad.