Keep Me (Broken Heroes 3)

What the fuck am I doing?

I can’t bring her up here. I can’t have her around my son. I can’t treat her like a guest in my house. I can’t do any of these fucking things because she is the fucking enemy. Curling my fingers into her tender flesh, I clench my jaw and turn on my heels, walking down the stairs and into the basement.

I carry her into one of the holding cells that hasn’t been used since my son was born. It’s cold and damp, and it doesn’t seem right to leave her down here. Deep in the pit of my stomach, I feel that this is wrong. But that’s merely my infatuation with her, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I lay her small body down on the cot. When I do this, I realize one of her small hands is fisting into my shirt, as if she is trying to hold onto me.

I peel her fingers away and watch her sleeping features turn into a frown. It’s strange how she was so fearful while awake, but now she clings to me as if I’m her savior. I almost laugh at the thought. She has no idea the things I can and will do to get what I want.

I stand up straight and watch her barely dressed body curl up into herself like she is cold. There are no blankets down here. Comfort has never been on my mind when it comes to holding a prisoner, and I know it shouldn’t be any other way with her either, but it is.

I briefly think about tying her up in my bedroom, but her wrists and ankles are already so bloody it will only cause more damage. I have to leave her here; it’s the right thing to do.

She is the enemy… a foe, my father’s whore. Repeating the verse over and over again inside my head, I force my feet to move, taking me out of the room. I close the door and lock it behind me. I have to do what’s obligated of me.

I need to think about my son, and his future, about his safety, not some woman who’s only useful for the hole between her legs. I don’t have room for a woman in my life. After all, the last one ended up dead because of her own stupidity. She proved to me that you can’t trust anyone, no one but yourself. Still, I look at this fucking woman and feel a thud in my chest.

My heart is beating hard and fast because of her, and I don’t fucking understand why. I wrap my hand around one of the iron bars, envisioning myself wrapping that same hand around her delicate throat.

Would I squeeze hard enough to kill her? Or would I test the limits, showing her what would happen if she disobeyed me?

It doesn’t matter even if she is an innocent in all of this. If she doesn’t tell me what I want to know, she’ll pay just like everyone else… with her blood.

Chapter 3

Ella

My eyes feel as if there are elephants sitting on them. They’re impossibly heavy, and I use every ounce of strength possible to open them. As soon as I do, I remember that what I thought was nothing more than a nightmare is actually my reality. A shiver runs down my spine. Partly out of fear, partly because I’m actually freezing.

It takes me a moment to take in my surroundings. I’m on a cot, in some kind of cell, but that is not the scariest part. It’s the man who is standing next to my cot looming over me that has my heart rate skipping a beat.

“Good morning, little mouse.” His voice is deep; his dark eyes hold me in place.

He takes a seat on the way-too-small cot beside me and, for a moment, I think his weight is going to break the thing beneath us. He’s a big man, rippling muscles, at least a foot taller than me.

His leg is touching my ribs, and I want to move away from him, but his body heat is just too precious to refuse. Instead of pulling away, I move closer.

“Why am I here?” My voice is small and weak, and my throat and my mouth feel like they have cotton balls shoved in them. I could really use a drink of water, but I’m not dumb enough to ask this man for anything.

“You don’t get to ask questions. I do and you are going to answer every single one of them or I’m going to have to do some things you don’t want me to do.” The warning is clear. If I don’t give him the answers he wants, whatever they might be, he will hurt me.

I try and conjure up a response. I don’t know what kind of information he thinks I have for him, because I know nothing.