I’ve never been less excited about a birthday in my life. My seventeenth was hard as I knew that officially put a countdown on my freedom, but I still had a whole year. Now, that year is up.
“Get moving,” Lucien growls, giving me a hard shove and making my feet pick up their pace. I stumble around, not yet ready to be up and walking after being knocked out. My head spins and I do my best to keep moving.
Lucien isn’t going to put up with my incompetence for long. He’s already starting to get frustrated with me, especially after evading him for so long. He’s going to punish me. He’s going to blame me for the acts he committed against Blake, he’s going to fault me for him ramming me and Slade off the bridge, and he’s going to tell me that had he shot Slade this morning that it would have been on me too.
Lucien is going to punish me for every single sin I didn’t commit.
He’s a monster through and through. There is no way he’ll ever see that this is all on him. To Lucien, the sun shines out of his own ass. He’s a God, unstoppable and all-powerful. No one can touch him which is why he takes whatever the hell he wants, consequences be damned.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that he just evaded his arrest warrant and is somehow walking freely around his home. He should be in hiding. Cops should see that he’s here and should be storming the property, but then, most of them are on his payroll. I’ll probably be punished for that too, but when I consider the options of either me being punished or Daniella, I’d choose me. She’s already been through so much and is only just coming out of the darkness. I still have so much more to endure, and in hindsight, what’s a little more? It wouldn’t be fair bringing her back down into it.
We reach the closed bedroom door that holds so many horrors on the other side and my hands tear free of Lucien’s tight grip and fly up, bracing myself against the frame. My heart rate kicks up a notch. I can’t go in there. This room…fuck.
I fear what’s on the other side of this door more than I fear for my life.
Lucien steps into my back and I feel him pressing into my ass as his dirty breath hits my skin. “I dare you,” he challenges, his tone low and full of promise. “I dare you to find out what happens if you don’t get your sweet ass through that door in the next two seconds.”
My resolve breaks and a traitorous tear rolls down my cheek as Lucien’s hand slips around my waist and grabs the door handle. He twists it and pushes the door open with a hard swing, allowing it to bounce off the wall. He gives me a devastating push, releasing me and watching with a smirk as I tumble down to my hands and knees.
Lucien kicks the door closed behind him and strides over to me. Fear rattles me as I try my best to get my feet under me but he grabs my hair and with an impressive show of strength, hauls me clear across the room.
I crash into the side of the bed, slamming my back against the hardwood and crumbling to the ground in pain. I cry out as my back aches but the sound is drowned out by his deep rumbling laugh. “You didn’t like that, did you?” he grins, making me feel sick as I reach for the bed and try to pull myself up. “But guess what? The fun is only just beginning.”
“Stay away from me,” I scream, desperately searching around my old room for anything that could be used as a weapon, but it seems my room has been completely cleared out of anything that resembles my old life. The bedsheets seem to be the only familiar thing in here, the same ones that were on this very bed only a few short months ago.
Lucien continues as though I hadn’t just screamed at him. “You think you can run from me?” he demands. “Do you have any idea what kind of hell your little stunt has cost me? I’ve had Marcus breathing down my neck wanting to know where the fuck his bride went.”
He gets closer and I start to panic, wondering how quickly I could get the window open and throw myself out of it, death be damned. I’m sure wherever I’m going in the next life is going to be a million times better than this.
Lucien grins as his hand digs deep into his pocket and produces a set of handcuffs. He dangles it from his finger. “You’ll never evade me again, princess.”
I run.
As if sensing what I’m going to do long before I move, Lucien darts in front of me and catches me with a rough arm around my waist. His fingers dig into the skin of my upper arm, the metal from the handcuff also digging in. “I don’t fucking think so,” he warns, pushing me back toward the bed.
I go crashing down and scramble as he steps up to the bed, a sickening sense of déjà vu traveling through me. This can’t happen again. I won’t allow it, but how the hell am I supposed to stop it? He’s huge and I’m nothing. I don’t even have a weapon.
All those times the boys would get into fights, I was useless. They’re bigger than me, stronger than me. It was always so easy for Slade to grab me and throw me off his back like a ragdoll. How the hell am I ever supposed to fight this?
Lucien grabs me, two hands on the back of my shirt. He picks me up and tosses me to the top of the bed, quickly coming down on top of me to keep me pinned. I try to fight him off, kicking and screaming as he fights to grab hold of my wrist.
“HELP,” I scream through the burning in my throat, feeling as though the high-pitched wail is severing my vocal cords.
“Scream all you want,” he laughs with a low, deep rumble. “I had your room sound-proofed for this very reason. You’re not marrying for another twelve days, and you have a lot of crimes to make up for.”
I bring my knee up and try to slam it between his legs but narrowly miss, only angering the beast further. “You little bitch,” he growls. “When I’m through with you, you’ll finally know how to respect a man.”
“Over my dead body. You can do whatever the fuck you want to me and I’ll still never respect you. You’re fucking trash. You’re a worthless piece of shit and you’re going to spend the rest of your life rotting in prison.”
“You really think?” he laughs, wrestling my wrist up above my head and quickly cuffing it before tightening it to the bed, making it impossible to move. “How’d the arrest warrant turn out for you? You can’t fucking touch me, princess.”
I scowl up at him, pulling tirelessly at my wrist in hopes that I can break the wood and free myself. Lucien moves back to survey his handiwork with a sickening grin. “Keep tugging on that all you like. I couldn’t care less if you break your wrist. Marcus might have an issue with it though, I’m sure he’s going to need both your wrists working perfectly fine for your wedding night.”
“You’re fucking sick.”
He shrugs, my words not affecting him in the least. “You do what you have to do for business, love. One day you’ll understand that.” He strides around to the opposite side of the bed, never taking his eyes off my body. “If you were smart, you would have learned from me like your brother did. He was going places.”
I clench my jaw. I knew this was coming.
“You did that to him. He could have been a star. You took away his life. You fucking raised him. How could you even do that? Are you that threatened that he could have become something great without you?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”