Bad Medicine (Underworld Kings)

What I failed to realize until this moment is the easy access I just gave him to my arm, not until I feel the cold metal wrap around my thin wrist, nothing but flesh and bone, and hear the startling number of clicks it takes for the cuff to become tight around me. He seems to notice too, and his eyes flash with something—not quite anger, not quite protectiveness. Something in between.

“Trust has to be earned, not freely given,” he tells me in his low, gravelly tone that sends a shiver up my spine.

I swallow. “Yet you want me to trust you, no questions asked.” The words come out of my mouth without permission, just like they did every time I spoke to him between the kitchen and where we stand now. Is it my fear making my brain-to-mouth filter malfunction, or is there something about this man that makes me want to speak exactly what’s on my mind, subconsciously knowing I’m safe to talk freely without worry of some kind of punishment?

“I’ve done all I can so far to earn your trust, Arabella. I’ve been nothing but gentle with you. I’ve fed you. I haven’t hurt you in any way. That’s how I earn people’s trust, with actions, not words,” he explains, and I can’t even argue, because what he said is true. He hasn’t done anything to me that would warrant mistrust—well, aside from kidnapping me.

Except for the fact that he’s now tugging my arm attached to the handcuffs, using his other arm to lift me on top of the huge bed, where he snaps the other cuff around one of the wooden rungs of the headboard. He yanks on the bedspread until he pulls it out from under me, then lays it across my lower half. I would complain, but it’s like I’ve been tucked into a cloud, and the handcuffs aren’t all that uncomfortable.

My body sinks into the mattress and pillows, an overwhelming sense of fatigue washing over me so briskly I wonder if he drugged me, put something in my food. But as if he can read my mind, he says, “Your adrenaline has worn off, and if what I assume is true, you haven’t been so well-fed in quite some time, so the combination of your body coming down along with your full belly will make for good, deep sleep.”

He tells me this with a look of caring in his eyes I’ve never seen from anyone before, not my husband, and not even my own father. It loosens something inside my chest I didn’t know was strung tight, and it makes me relax even further into the comfort of the big bed. He lifts his hand to my face, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear, then tracing the line of my jaw before he stands up straight again.

“Get some sleep, piccolina. I have something I need to take care of tonight before I can join you,” he murmurs, the soft look in his eyes still there as he steps back from the bed, then turns and walks out the door.

Try as I might though, I don’t immediately fall asleep, even though my body tries to drag me under. My mind won’t just shut off. What in the hell just happened in the last two hours? Wasn’t it just a few days ago that I was daydreaming about someone coming to steal me away from my cloistered life? Did I manifest this? And as scared as I am of this situation in reality, the emotional lines are blurred because I had been fantasizing about this happening. Over and over again, I brought myself to orgasm with this exact image in mind—the handsome “bad guy” taking me from my ivory tower and whisking me away to his castle.

How did my fantasy come true so accurately?

If I had written it down in a diary somewhere, I would believe someone got ahold of it and was paying this man to role play and act out this dream of mine. But I never had. God only knows what Ferro would’ve done if he’d found it.

Ferro—what will he do when he discovers I’m missing? I would be worried it’d take him forever to figure out I’m gone since he only visits me once a month, but that’s not the case, because certainly my security team realized I wasn’t home almost immediately. They would’ve informed him within minutes of me not making it up to my apartment after my driver dropped me off.

Could they be tracking me right now, as I lay comfortable and not in a panic in another man’s bed? No. I have nothing on me that could be tracked. Everything I had with me when DeLuca took me from that alley was new. A bag of books, my purse I’d just purchased the day before that only had my credit card, ID, and lipstick. I’d purposely left my phone at home to not be disturbed at my happy place—the bookstore. Anything I needed otherwise, I could simply ask my driver for.