I slid down the wall, the rough stone poking at my back uncomfortably. Minutes passed as Papa rambled and I grew nervous, worried someone would notice I’d left my “room”. I looked down the curved hallway, wondering if I should go back.
“Frankie?” he called out. “Frankie is that you?” I didn’t immediately recognize that he was talking to me. I assumed it was just more incoherent mumbling, but then his eyes met mine, stare hollow yet piercing. “Frankie, I know that’s you. I love you, Frankie.”
This was it.
This was everything. I’d just opened my mouth to seek the truth Lucia denied me when another voice cut me off.
“Granddaughter.” My spine stiffened. My mind swam with excuses, a hundred different roads that all pointed in the same direction: trapped. When the lead settled in my gut and I knew I had no other choice, I slowly turned to look at the entrance, finding Lucia there with her arms folded. She’d spoken to me, but her icy blue eyes were trained on Papa.
“You always were resourceful Notte,” she continued. “Using any lie to gain leverage.” I had a half second to register the meaning of her words before she turned to me. “Don’t ever forget he left you to the Beast, Frankie.” Her frosty stare caught mine and I knew I was going to get it. I’d left the velvet room, had gone searching for Papa.
“I may have been too harsh earlier,” she said, holding her palm out for me. I eyed the open hand warily. When I didn’t immediately take it, she sighed and shook her hand. “You are valuable, bambina. When you leave, I worry.”
I chewed the inside of my bottom lip, pulling at the rubbery, wet skin with my teeth. There was no other way this ended than with me taking her hand, yet I made the seconds last. The air stilled like dew freezing on a window.
Her easy demeanor drained as I refused to take her hand, icy spider webs crawling along the window, betraying the impatience beneath. I could hear the crack of glass, see the twitch of her smile, so I reached out my hand and grasped hers. Her level smile returned and she pulled me off the floor, leading me away from the dungeon. When I looked over my shoulder, Papa had already started mumbling incoherently.
We went beyond the curtained rooms, up the steps, and into the club. I didn’t take my eyes off her the entire time. It wasn’t until we reached my room that I looked away.
There were some very noticeable new additions to my room: three small cameras clung to the corners of the ceiling. I looked to Lucia to see if she would say something, but she acted as if she hadn’t just taken me out of a dungeon where Papa was held prisoner and where I’d been kept under threat of rape.
She let go of my hand and sat on the edge of my four-poster bed. She patted it, letting me know I needed to sit too. Her kindness was a smokescreen, but I joined her. When I was within reach, she gripped the pendant at my neck, pulling it so tight that the chain bit the back of my neck. My muscles strained painfully with the effort of not falling into her lap, and she knew it.
“You should be careful who you let into your heart, bambina,” she said, eyes trained on the diamond rose. “Men are only good at breaking them.”
“What?” The surprise in my voice was too obvious. I was not like these people who were so good at hiding their real intent I often wondered if they knew it themselves. Did she know about Anteros? She dropped the pendant, put her hands in her lap, and smiled at me, crystal blue eyes glittering.
“Your papa, of course. What did you think I meant?”
I rolled my lips between my mouth, certain that whatever I said, whether truth or lie, would give away too much. A few more seconds passed between us wherein I said nothing, and then she stood, straightening the fabric of her blood red skirt with matching blazer. The material was smooth and creamy, there were no wrinkles anyway.
I kept my eyes trained on her as she went to the door. If Nikolai was a snake, Lucia was the king cobra. Before she left, her polished red nails gripped the frame and she turned back to me.
“Don’t fall into the trap of thinking I don’t know exactly what goes on around here,” she said. “I know everything, bambina. My brother fell into that trap and now he’s dead.” She shrugged with a tinkling laugh. “Or good as.”
When she left, my body released all the tension it had been holding the past few days. I was suddenly exhausted, bone weary, but the cameras made it impossible to relax. They looked like the same ones I’d had back with Anteros—black, beady bugs. I looked to the armoire. The phone was accessible, but I had to be discreet about it. I just prayed no one had discovered it while they were installing the cameras.
I kicked the rug up with my foot and bent down, pretending to put it back into place when really checking for the phone. I exhaled; it was still there. I carefully picked it up and stuffed it into my shirt then walked over to what I hoped was a blindspot. Who could have guessed that my month with the Beast was really just training for Grandma?
Even after three days of Lucia’s punishment, Anteros still hadn’t sent a text.
I’d given up my freedom for what? A man I had waited hours for, had now suffered days in a hell for, and who couldn’t even send me a text? All night I’d sat in that creepy ass church. Everything creaked in there, the shadows moving along the walls like phantoms. Truthfully, though, it was beautiful. It was beautiful in a way that I never wanted to admit because admitting it was just the final dagger through my heart. It meant he knew the way to my heart, he just didn’t want to take it.
I hated myself so much, hated that he was the first thing I went for. Before a shower. Before sleeping in a bed not covered in human secretion. I wanted to see if he’d sent me something.
And he hadn’t.
Lucia’s words echoed in my skull.
One text, five days later. Not asking to meet up, not an apology. Just one. Fu
cking. Text.
Still angry, my little slave?
He sent a photo of his hard cock along with the text, but only the outline it made against his satin sleep pants. The image had my body temperature rising and my core throbbing instantly—and he fucking knew that, I was sure of it. I nearly chucked my phone at the wall. Instead I cradled it in my palms, reading it over and over again, like a junky desperate for a fix. I knew he’d called me his slave to piss me off, but still, after everything he’d done to me, after the way he’d spoken to me at the church, after everything I’d gone through to meet him, I was his slave.
I’d been imprisoned. Threatened to be made a whore. My freedom had been stolen. Now I had to crouch in the corner of my bedroom to hide from cameras. And that was all he sent me?