Total pages in book: 52
Estimated words: 48018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
I follow him to his office, where, without a word, Angelo wraps his hand around the back of my neck, bends me over the desk and fucks me firmly. It’s sex, but it’s not for sex. It’s a hard cock in my cunt because he thinks I need it. Most men fuck because they want to sate their own lusts. Angelo fucks for control. He fucks like a master, stilling my mind and overwhelming my senses with the rough intensity of his lovemaking.
He leaves me dripping his seed and in a happy little well-fucked haze. I feel that dreamy feeling, a very similar one to the one I felt in my memory. The one where I didn’t have the scar.
I am fighting my own memory, which tries to close around my probing mind and envelop it in sensual mush. Angelo and my mind are in league to stop me from thinking certain things and feeling certain ways.
“What is it, Riley?” He grips me by the chin and angles my eyes up to his. He knows something is going on in my mind and he is going to insist on dragging it out of me.
“What… why… why me? Of all the people you could have taken.”
He smiles. “You intrigued me. There was something in your gaze. Something that called to me. Some people get into law enforcement to catch the bad guys. Others get into law enforcement because they want to be closer to evil.”
That statement hits me right in the gut. My fascination with Angelo and his lover was always just as personal as it was professional. I was obsessed with him. Them. I laid in bed at night and I thought about them, reviewed old cases, listened to interviews with witnesses and previous captives who had survived them. I had become so immersed in all things Vitali that when he took me, it was barely a hardship to sink into his world.
“I didn’t capture you, Riley,” he purrs. “I brought you home.”
I feel tears pricking at my eyes as a sense of belonging and yes, love, washes over me. Angelo chose me because he saw me. He recognized me as one of his. For a very long time, I thought I was a lone wolf. But I was never a lone wolf. I was just a bitch without a pack.
“I don’t know what you’re fighting now,” he says. “But whatever it is, we will be standing at the end of it. I have no intention of letting you go, because I know exactly where you belong. Here.”
“Did you…” I can barely form the question. It seems like such a mad thing to ask. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to my womb?”
There. It’s out. I’m asking him if he was behind the worst incident in my life. I’m trusting him to answer honestly, which is possibly the maddest thing I have ever done.
“Did I fix you, Riley? Did I have you spayed like an animal?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Let’s say I had. Would you hate me? Or would you see that it is far better for a woman like you in a world like this never to bear life? There is no world in which you are mine, and you have offspring, Riley. We do not live in the world of those who have the luxury of breeding family.”
His words are harsh, delivered in that accent that makes every syllable art, even terrible ones. I feel the walls of my mind closing in with the terrible possibility that the man I have sold my soul to has taken not only my life, but the lives of all those who might have come after me.
“Is that a yes?” I whisper the question.
“You were in my home. You were harmed in my care. Yes, I bear some responsibility for that. Did I do it? Did I pull the trigger? Was I reckless enough to have you hit with a bullet that could easily have hit an artery as an organ? No.”
I believe him.
But perversely, I think there was some part of me that wanted his answer to be yes. I wanted him to have taken everything from me. I wanted everything, my joy, my pain, my twisted sickness, all to belong to him.
“You are disappointed,” he says, observant as ever. “Did you want it to be my fault? Did you want to have a reason to loathe me? Or did you want to be my perfect little victim, losing both body and mind to me?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble.
“You do, and so do I. You can always be my perfect little victim, Riley.”
16
Bobby and I become twin terrors. Whenever Angelo unleashes us, we are as brutal as we are efficient. The sight of a dark-haired man and a blonde woman is enough to send the criminal underworld into paroxysms of fear. We have not toned our approach down at all. If anything, we are growing bolder every time Angelo sends us out, trusting that he will never let us come to any harm.