The terrain was harsh, unforgiving. He saw the way she winced as the sharp rocks in the limestone trail cut at the soft soles of her feet.
‘Almost there,’ he said. She gave a small smile of appreciation. Wait. Why the fuck was he comforting her? Because they’d fucked the night before?
When she crested the hill and he gave her a set of binoculars, she wouldn’t be smiling in appreciation anymore. She’d be bawling her fucking eyes out in despair.
He couldn’t figure out if the annoying buzz in his stomach was excitement or dread.
He was about to destroy the girl who already thought she’d lost everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Mariana
My feet were bleeding and blistered. We’d finally reached the peak of the trail, which was washed out in some places, and completely gone in others. Still, Dornan seemed to know where he was going, as he pressed on.
But the bastard was wearing hiking boots. He had water. I’d resorted to licking the sweat from my palms whenever I thought he wasn’t looking.
‘That won’t work,’ he said, as I pressed my palm to my mouth again. ‘Too much salt. You’re only making yourself thirstier.’
I glared at him, stopping where I stood.
He stopped a few paces ahead of me and turned sharply, sending rocks skittering from beneath the soles of his heavy boots.
‘You really want to test me?’ he asked. ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of.’
I blinked back tears. My top was clinging to my back, drenched in sweat. Flies buzzed around my face, trying to extract the last bit of moisture from the corners of my eyes and mouth. I swatted at them, but they were relentless.
‘Please,’ I pleaded. ‘My feet are bleeding.’
He pointed to a spot about a hundred metres up. ‘Just a little further. Then you can sit.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll even give you some water.’
He winked at me and pressed on, widening the distance between us. I hesitated a moment, taking a chance to get a breath and look around. This wasn’t the family hiking trail, oh no. We’d passed several signs that warned we were trespassing on private property, and to turn back. Dornan had ignored every one of them.
My hesitation evaporated as I took in the hot desert around us, punctuated by mountains and a salty marsh. The terrain was unforgiving.
If I ran, I’d die. Even if I managed to evade Dornan, the desert would swiftly claim me.
Now his refusal to give me water made sense. I was dependent on him, even out here. Of course, I wouldn’t run.
I started walking again, pushing my hands on my knees to try and get some traction with each heavy, sharp step that tore open fresh skin on the soles of my feet.
Finally, I reached the top of the impressive hillside, panting as I stood beside Dornan.
He took a long sip from his canteen. ‘Want some water?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said.
He nodded, gesturing to a rock beside him. ‘Sit.’
I did, grateful to have the weight off my poor abused feet.
He crouched in front of me, the grin on his face annoying the fuck out of me.
‘What is so funny?’ I asked, a little more sharply than I should have.
Darkness snapped back into his eyes again and I flinched.
‘I’m going to show you something,’ he said, his voice completely serious now. A charge of electricity sizzled and burst as it flared between us.
It was like the air suddenly became thicker, more humid, and if he touched me, I’d burst into flames.
‘Okay,’ I said, my thirst driving me insane.
‘You’re not allowed to run,’ he warned. ‘If you run, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand?’
I nodded.
‘What I’m about to show you,’ he continued, ‘will seem like cruelty. It will make you feel like you want to die. But you’re not going to die, Ana.’
My hands began to shake as I took in a dry, hot gulp of desert air.
‘Are you sure I want to see it?’ I whispered.
He nodded. ‘You’ll thank me, one day.’
‘Water first,’ he said. Delight sprang forth inside me.
I smiled like a good little slave. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and I meant it. I was so fucking thankful that he was finally letting me have something to drink.
Still crouched in front of me, eye to eye, he took the canteen from a loop on his belt and unscrewed it. He smiled slightly as he pressed the stainless steel canteen to his lips, taking a mouthful.
Taunting me?
He set the canteen at his feet, and I frowned in confusion. His smile remained, wolfish and self-assured, and I realised he hadn’t swallowed. He gestured with one crooked finger for me to come closer.
Oh.
I leaned forward. In that moment, I couldn’t have given two shits that he wanted to give me the water from his own mouth. Ordinarily, the power play would have annoyed me no end. But now, all I saw was an opportunity to slake my unending thirst.
He pressed his lips to mine, raising himself slightly so he was above me. Then he opened his mouth and let the cold water inside flow into my mouth.
It was divine. It was bliss. It was exactly what I needed.
As I swallowed the last drop of water, his hand reached around the back of my head. I tested his hold gently; I wouldn’t be able to pull away if I tried.
Our mouths had been simply touching before, a bridge to pour the water from one vessel to another. But the water was gone now, and I jolted as I felt his tongue against mine.
It was cold, still fresh with the moisture from the water. Without thinking, I pressed my lips against his harder, tilted my head, and caressed his tongue with my own. I would have eaten him alive if I thought it would quench my thirst.
I felt his lips twitch, and I knew he was smiling. Bastard. I tried to pull away but he anticipated my move, opening his mouth wider, and kissed me with a violence that was as terrifying as it was exciting.
I stopped resisting. I melted into his possessive embrace.
I was already going to live and die with this man.
I might as well enjoy it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Mariana
He was the one who broke the kiss, surprisingly. His face was serious again, and that made me nervous.
‘Is everything okay?’ I asked as he pulled me to my feet.
He gave me a long sidewards look, a look that held something impermeable just beneath the surface. Something I could almost, but not quite reach out and touch.
The uncertainty made me dizzy.
He stood before me and placed a hand on each of my shoulders.
‘Don’t hate me,’ he said gruffly. ‘What I’m about to show you … It’s mercy, baby. It’s better this way.’
My stomach lurched. He squeezed my shoulders and then let me go, unclipping a small pair of binoculars from his belt and pressing them into my palm.
I took a step back, my heels hitting the rock I’d just been sitting on. ‘I-I don’t want to look,’ I stuttered, trying to give the binoculars back. He just pushed my hands away. ‘You don’t want to see your father?’ he asked. ‘Your brother?’
I looked at him for a beat as those words sank in. He wasn’t lying.
I whipped those binoculars to my eyes and scanned the flat desert below us, seeing nothing but scrub and salty marsh broken up by the occasional boulder.
A hand covered mine, and Dornan tilted me the right way.
Two people came into view, grainy at first, but as my eyes adjusted, I choked. My father was walking along a trail, carrying something small and round in front of him — a compass, perhaps? Behind him, Pablo followed, two shovels resting across the back of his broad shoulders.
‘What are they doing?’ I whispered. ‘Do they know I’m here?’
Dornan tutted. ‘Watch.’
I took my eyes from the binoculars and glanced at Dornan for a moment. He wasn’t paying any attention to my two fam
ily members; he was watching my every expression with a severity that suggested he was waiting for me to react to something.
My stomach dipped uncomfortably again.
‘Are you going to shoot them?’ I asked quietly, staring at the sniper rifle hanging from his shoulder.
He ran his fingers through my hair, starting at the crown of my skull and combing them all the way through to my split ends, patting my back to finish the comforting gesture.
‘I won’t shoot them,’ he said. ‘Unless you attract their attention. You know what that means, don’t you? No screaming, baby. No shouting. And definitely no running away.’
I nodded in understanding, bringing the binoculars back up to my eyes.
An odd sensation of impending doom began to blossom inside me as I found my brother in the round viewing panes again. While we’d been talking, he had started to dig. For what, I wasn’t sure, but a terrifying suspicion was starting to form in my mind.
A body. They were digging for a body.
Suddenly, my brother struck something. He dropped his shovel and dropped to his knees, shifting dirt with his hands. My father joined him, the two hefting dirt and clay with their hands as fast as they could.
‘Ana,’ Dornan said beside me. I tore my eyes from the sight in front of me to look at him in horror.
‘What are they digging up?’
He didn’t reply, instead pointing to his rifle. ‘I’m looking through the scope to get a better visual,’ he warned me, bringing the gun up to his shoulder. ‘I’m not going to shoot.’
My mouth opened and a strangled cry came out. Tears burned at my eyes.
‘Okay?’ Dornan demanded. I nodded.
‘Don’t lose your shit yet,’ he said, peering through his scope. ‘This is for your own good.’
I didn’t see how that could be possible, but there was nothing I could do anyway, so I returned to my binoculars.
A hand. There was a hand sticking out of the dirt. As my brother shifted, I saw a foot, and then a flash of black material clinging to dull bronze thighs.
I choked, looking to Dornan for answers. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Please don’t tell me that’s my sister. Please.’
I was sobbing now, racking sobs that carried through my chest. Had I done something wrong? Was this my punishment?
Dornan lowered the rifle, letting it fall around his shoulder by the strap, and circled his arms around my waist. He leaned down, tucking his face into the hollow space between my cheek and shoulder.
‘It’s not your sister,’ he said, and that was the moment I knew. I lowered the binoculars, staring at my bare hand. My black onyx ring, the one I’d been wearing when I was taken, had been removed the night Murphy readied me for the auction.
I cried harder as Dornan confirmed my suspicions.
‘It’s you,’ he whispered, holding me so tightly, I could barely breathe.
My father screamed then, so loud that I heard it clearly despite the considerable distance between us.
‘But it’s not me,’ I said desperately, through the tears. ‘They’ll see my face!’
Dornan gripped me harder as I began to struggle in earnest against his burly arms.
‘Look again.’
He gripped my hands, bringing the binoculars back up to my eyes.
‘Wait,’ I said, wiping my eyes against my shoulder, getting rid of the tears.
I swallowed, steeled myself, and peered into the binoculars once more.
They wouldn’t know that the body wasn’t me.
It didn’t have a head.
I froze, unable to tear my eyes away from the headless corpse they’d dragged from her shallow grave. She wore my black dress and my grandmother’s black onyx ring, but she wasn’t me. I wondered whether she was already dead when Dornan found her, if he’d simply taken advantage of the situation, or if she had died purely for this grotesque little freak show Dornan had staged.
I drew in a sharp breath as my brother knotted a handkerchief around his nose and mouth before taking a large hunting knife in his hand.
The microchip. Of course.
He started to cut into the unyielding flesh of the corpse. It looked slippery, tough, and I winced as he had to stop several times to collect himself.
He did it, though. He sliced into that rotting skin and pressed his fingers into the flesh. The dead corpse didn’t bleed like a live person would.
My brother pulled something out and handed it to my father. It was the microchip. My father wailed and dropped to his knees.
‘They think you’re dead,’ Dornan breathed in my ear.
No shit, hombre.
‘I don’t want to watch anymore,’ I said. ‘Please, why are you doing this?’
‘Wait,’ Dornan breathed. I did what I was told, and I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long before a third person entered my highly magnified field of view.
No.
‘Stop,’ I pleaded, but Dornan pressed the binoculars closer to my eyes, the pressure on my eye sockets enough to make my eyes water.
I drew back from the binoculars violently as I caught a glimpse of her face.
Holy. Fuck.
It was my sister. She was crying and screaming as she saw what she thought was my dead body, and I watched in horror as she leaned over and vomited next to the rotting corpse. Seeing her distraught reaction made me snap.
I began to struggle with every bit of strength I had, elbows flying. I pitched my head forward, which Dornan obviously wasn’t expecting, and snapped it back, crying out in pain as the back of my head slammed against his face. I heard a sickening crunch and wondered if I’d broken his nose.
‘Stop,’ he said firmly, as something warm and wet dropped onto my shoulder. I had made his nose bleed. But I didn’t care. I continued to struggle, even as he wrapped one hand around my face, pinching my nose shut and sealing off my mouth at the same time with his death grip.
I immediately tried to get a breath in and failed, sucking at the airless vacuum Dornan had created.
‘Calm down,’ Dornan murmured in my ear, his blood continuing to trickle onto my shoulder. But I was possessed by grief, in the most ironic way. I had grieved my family, and now they would grieve me, and none of us had actually died.
Dornan’s mouth was warm at my ear, his words sounding further and further away as I struggled for breath.
‘Listen, baby,’ he whispered in that smoke and gravel voice. ‘They will mourn you. They will grieve you. And they will stop trying to get you back.’
I fought for air, but none came. The world started to spin, the only constant and clear thing in my universe the haunting voice in my ear.
‘You’re free, now,’ he murmured. ‘They will let you go.’
I reached my hands out desperately, wanting to touch my loved ones, even though I knew they stood hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t believe this farce, surely? It wasn’t me. Her arms were shorter than mine, her skin was lighter. I was alive! I was right here.
The sun pounded overhead, blinding me with its ferocity, and I continued to reach out, until my arms grew too heavy. They fell to my sides as I drooped in Dornan’s unrelenting embrace, and the world burst from yellow to black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Mariana
Dornan must have carried me the entire way back down the trail and hefted me into the back seat. I awoke to my head hitting the window behind me.
I tried to back up as he crawled on top of me, his fingers like vices on each of my thighs.
I screamed, and he slapped me across the face so hard I tasted blood. Rage poured off me in waves, and if I clenched my jaw any harder I was going to shatter every tooth in my mouth.
Well, fuck. I couldn’t beat him and he was too strong for me to even try. The struggle left my limbs as I let myself melt into the car seat below me, wanting to die. I’d just witnessed my family unearth my corpse, or what they thought was my corpse, so why press on? Why hope that life would ever be an
y different?
‘If it makes any difference,’ Dornan said quietly, ‘I am very sorry that this happened to you, Ana.’
I sobbed, then, because there was nothing else for me to do. I opened my mouth and sucked in deep lungfuls of air, my head whirling, as my body shook with my despair.
‘I don’t want your pity,’ I spat, my eyes flooding with more tears.
And then, softer, ‘You took away their last hope. Why did you do that?’
He gazed down at me, and he was terrifying. He caressed the side of my face with a dominance that said he wasn’t ever going to let me go.
‘Let me tell you a story about hope,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I loved a girl once. She was beautiful, and funny, and smart.’ He swallowed angrily. ‘One day, she just fucking vanished. Gone. I looked but I never found her. I looked for eight fucking years.’
‘And don’t you hope that she’s alive?’ I asked.
He laughed mirthlessly, rolling his eyes before bringing them back to pin me down. Fury and grief radiated from him, mixing with my own anger and sadness.
We were a sorry pair.
‘I wish she was fucking dead,’ he growled. ‘Hope is a piece of shit that gives you nothing, you understand? Hope is a useless fucking emotion.’
I lashed out furiously with my fists. He caught them easily before I’d even connected with his face.
‘It’s not up to you!’ I screamed. ‘You’re not God! It’s not your right to decide!’
He didn’t seem angered by my outburst, though. He lowered his face to mine and kissed my cheek, my mouth, my neck and my collarbone — everywhere the tears had touched.
‘Why do you think I showed you?’ he whispered in between kisses that were growing more and more urgent.
I laughed like a crazy woman, my eyes so puffy I was only seeing half of the world. ‘To torture me. To make me cry.’
He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him. I stared into his eyes with hatred.
‘I did it to make you understand what’s happening.’
‘Oh really,’ I asked, less hateful this time. ‘What’s happening here?’
He stopped kissing me for a moment and lifted himself so his face hovered above mine.