Hold You Against Me (Stripped 4)

All my grief, all my longing comes out in those words. Torment fills his eyes, a deep pain that mirrors my own. He may think he’s changed, but I recognize the boy in those deep wells.

Then his expression flattens. There’s no emotion there, only hard lines. “Giovanni Costas did die eight years ago. There was even a funeral for him.”

A tear slips down my cheek, unchecked. “I believed you were dead.”

He closes his eyes. When he opens them, there’s a new glint, almost cruel. “Then you understand. I’m someone else now, someone darker. Someone you don’t want to know.”

I rock back on my heels, shock and horror rendering me speechless. All I cared about was seeing him alive. Even if he took me captive, he was only following orders.

No one you want to know.

“Who told you to take me?” I whisper.

He shakes his head, and I already know the answer. No.

“Who made you do this?” I demand, tears burning the backs of my eyes. “Who’s going to use me for their own gains? For power? For blood?”

He swipes my cheek with the rough pad of his thumb, taking a glistening drop. His lips close around the thumb, sucking the salt of my tears. “No one made me do this, bella. I wanted to.”

It shouldn’t have been possible. When I left, Giovanni was barely even of age—and they would have known he helped Honor and me escape. He would have been punished somehow. And even without that, he was the son of a foot soldier. He never would have risen this high, not in eight years, not in a hundred.

Except there would have been a war when my father died.

Lineage and money would matter, but only the most brutal would win.

My eyes widen, and I scoot back across the soft limo carpet until my back touches the base of the seat on the opposite side. He’s telling me the truth. He really is a different man now, someone I didn’t want to know.

He nods, a slight dip of his head. “That’s right. You’re mine now.”

I make one last plea, one direct request. The old Gio would have given me this. “I want to go home. My sister is there, my friends. My school.”

“And your boyfriend?”

I look away, ashamed. I don’t want to talk about Shane.

An almost feral undercurrent sharpens his voice. “You’ll never see him again.”

The truth is I hadn’t planned on seeing him ever again. That relationship was a mistake. I let it go on too long. But I’m not about to tell Giovanni that, not when he’s keeping me against my will. “That’s none of your business. You don’t control me.”

His lip curls into a cruel smile. “Don’t I?”

And I finally understand in a soul-deep way: this isn’t the old Giovanni, the boy I met in the pool house. That Gio cared about me, about my family. My dreams. This man is a stranger.

Chapter Eight

My throat aches, dry from whatever drugs he gave me. As if he knows, he hands me a bottle of water. The seal is already broken. I give him a long look, full of suspicion and dark dread.

The corner of his lips tilts up. “You’re thirsty.”

“You’re drugging me.”

“It’s a long way,” he says, not sounding apologetic in the least.

Because he’s right, I take a sip. I am thirsty. And it’s a long way. Though most of all, I need those drugs to douse the raging fires in my mind—the joy, the pain. The fear.

When the bottle is half-empty, I hand it back. Then I curl up against the leather, as far away from Giovanni as I can get. He’s the last thing I see before sleep claims me again.

Dreams filter through the drug’s heavy shadows like glimpses of sunlight through the leaves. I remember his smile, sometimes shy, sometimes pleased, in the pool house. Then the picture changes—his face grows harder, darker, scarred. He doesn’t smile, not anymore. Just a tilt of his full lips, an echo of the boy he used to be.