Taken (Dark Legacy Duet 1)

Any normal person would feel pity for her, but not me. I like her fear. It gets my heart pumping, blood flowing. Gets my dick hard.

“Is it starting already?” she asks, her voice breaking a little.

“Is what starting already?” I ask, as if I don’t understand.

She shakes her head, opens her mouth, then closes it again, points to the bed. “I mean, what you want from me, we both know what that is.”

“What do I want from you?”

She looks at me, narrows her eyes. “I’m not going to play your stupid games.”

I uncross my legs, smiling as I rise, go to her.

She stands her ground, even when I get into her space, but flinches when I raise my hand to her face, almost touching her cheek, but not.

Instead, I set her hair behind her shoulders and take a moment to feel the texture of it, feel the difference of the black strands as opposed to the silver streak.

I lean in close to her, inhale her scent. She’s trembling a little.

“That’s too bad, because I like games,” I say.

I step back, look her over, then return to my seat, pick up my drink, and take a sip. I cross my leg over my knee again. “Your shoes are hideous.”

She looks down at them, gives me a little smirk when she looks back at me. “I like them.”

“Drink?” I ask her while I sip mine.

She shakes her head no.

“Sit down.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you going to stand for four more hours?”

She looks beyond me out the window, but it’s still night. “Where are we going?”

“Venice.”

“Venice? As in Italy?”

“Yes.”

“But…you can’t…” She sits on the edge of the bed, almost falls into it, and tugs the sleeves of the pretty black dress down into her palms.

I notice the strange ring on her finger.

She turns back to me with something like hope in her eyes. “I don’t have a passport.”

I almost chuckle. “I’ll stop the captain immediately, then. Tell him to turn the plane around. Call the whole thing off.” I extinguish that hope like a candle and I know it’s cruel to do it but it’s too easy and I can’t resist. And really, like a passport would matter if it was even true. “I have your passport. Your mother knew the rules. Everything was arranged, as it should be.”

“You’re a jerk.”

I shrug a shoulder.

She puts her fists to her forehead and squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re going to the Scafoni estate in Venice. There’s not much to understand. You will be comfortable—”

“Comfortable?” She snaps her gaze to me. “I will be anything but comfortable. Your brothers look at me like I’m a piece of meat. Your mother looks like she wants to stab me. And you…you…”

I’m on my feet and so is she. “No one’s going to stab you, Helena. Don’t be dramatic.”

She stops, looks up at me. “Don’t be dramatic?”

I don’t comment. I know it’ll take her time to accept her situation.

“Is this funny to you? Putting me and my sisters up on blocks like we’re slaves to be auctioned off, dressing us in decaying old…parchment—”

“It was hardly parchment—”

“Looking us over, one by one, judging us while your brothers look on, one of whom could barely keep his dick in his pants while you…you—”

“Settle down,” I warn, and when I step toward her, she backs up.

“While you touched me like you did. You’re sick, all of you, but especially you! You think this is funny? Kidnapping is funny? Making someone a slave to you, to your family, is funny?”

“Not just someone,” I say, closing the space between us so her back is to the wall. “You.”

She raises her arm to slap me, but I catch her wrist. “Don’t ever do that.”

She tries with her other arm, and I capture that one too. I raise both of them over her head and lean into her, pressing her back to the wall.

“Do you have a hearing problem, Willow Girl?”

“My name is Helena.”

“Your name is Willow Girl when I want it to be Willow Girl.”

She tries to free her arms, but she’s trapped. When she tries to knee me, I capture her leg between my thighs. And then she does something totally unexpected.

She spits.

Right in my face.

Instinctively, I transfer both of her wrists into one of my hands and raise my arm, palm flat, ready to strike, but she lets out a half-scream, and I stop because what the fuck am I doing?

Her eyes are huge, and I wonder if she isn’t as shocked with what she just did as I am.

I lower my hand, the one that was ready to slap her, and wipe off the spit, rage building inside me like lava coming up a volcano on the edge of erupting.

I grip her jaw and force her face up, look at her features, pretty and delicate. She’s so much smaller than me. My hand next to her face, it’s huge.