TAKEN

CHAPTER 5

“Turn around.”

I search his eyes, and they’re darker, the pupils dilated.

“Why do I have to ask everything twice?” he says.

I turn, and I realize the walls are not painted. They’re actually papered in a rich and very subtle paper with the most delicate pattern of roses repeating, repeating, repeating.

It’s what I concentrate on when I feel his fingers on me, when I gasp at the slight touch as he gathers up my hair and sets the mass of it over my shoulder to expose my back.

I find myself resting my forehead against the wall. I wonder if the ridges of the paper will imprint their pattern on my skin. I am suddenly tired.

He’s wearing me out, and he hasn’t even touched me yet. Hasn’t yet begun to use me.

His fingers play like a piano along my spine, tracing every vertebra as if with a feather, as if he’ll know every inch of me, every centimeter.

I set my fingertips on the wall, and I trace the pattern of the roses, none of which is bigger than the fingernail of my smallest finger, and they’re intertwining and suddenly overwhelming as they twist and turn their thorny, strangling stems again and again and again.

And I was wrong.

There is color.

I heard once that white contains all of the colors of the rainbow and thought what nonsense, but I see it now, in the roses that encircle this prison, my borrowed room.

I look up at it, rest the side of my cheek against the cool surface, and know there will be no reprieve, no break in the pattern. The roses are condemned to twist and turn and wind around and around and choke the life out of the next.

There will be no survivors. Not after this. Not after me.

My aunt’s ring seems to burn on my finger.

“I took from them.” I look at it, meet the empty eye sockets on the tiny skull, and I know that it’s not just any bone, but Scafoni bone that makes up the ring.

I shudder at the icy chill that runs up my spine.

His ancestor’s bone is my jewelry, and I want to laugh.

But then he touches me, and inside my belly, a thousand butterflies take flight as his fingers brush my skin so lightly, it’s almost like he doesn’t. Like it’s my mind playing tricks on me.

I want to turn and look to be sure, but then he cups my bottom with both hands, as if weighing or testing, perhaps for his whip, and then with one hand he gathers up my hair and for the first time in my life, I curse the length, think maybe I should cut it short, shave it like a monk, because he’s twisting it around his fist.

Sebastian turns me to face him, and the fingers of his other hand are combing through the mound of hair between my legs and sliding lower.

He’s hard. I feel him against my hip.

His fingers are in my folds now, and his eyes have gone black. He tilts my head back, and I hear my own shallow breathing because it feels good, what he’s doing, and I don’t want it to feel good, and I’m not expecting him to kiss me.

Why am I not expecting him to kiss me?

My mouth opens only because he’s tugging my head backward, hurting me. I lick my lips, and I feel the warmth of his touch. He doesn’t make the mistake of sliding his tongue inside my mouth. I would bite it off. Swallow it. He knows it.

Bone.

The ring is made of Scafoni bone.

He takes my lower lip between his and he’s kissing me and it’s so soft and erotic. His fingers between my legs have found my c**t because it’s swollen and sensitive and craves his touch. Like he’s not my enemy at all.

When I find myself involuntarily arching my back, tilting myself into his hand, I blink my eyes open and find he’s already watching me.

He’s been watching me all along, the bastard.

But that’s what it takes to snap me out of this insanity.

When I slap my hands on his chest to shove him away, he doesn’t budge but instead closes one hand around my throat and keeps me pressed against the wall while his other hand works my c**t and f**k, I can’t come. I can’t.

I won’t.

He grins a little, like he knows my dilemma. Like he knows he’ll win, and I feel my hips moving without my permission, feel myself press into his palm.

But then he makes a mistake when he kisses me again.

I close my hands over his shoulders, and I’m so close, so f*****g close, and I will not give him the satisfaction of coming.

I snap my teeth and bite down hard on his lip. The taste of blood, like iron in my mouth, it’s my victory, and I swallow it and I want more, even though I know he will make me pay.

I’m grinning when he pulls back, but not for long.

He uses the fistful of my hair and tugs my head back so hard I feel like he will scalp me.

“That was a mistake.”

He’s pissed, and I am glad. At least he’s not grinning anymore. Not smirking.

He must have known I would fight. He must want me to, because what’s the fun in taking a girl who won’t fight? In breaking a girl who has no fight in her?

He marches me like this, with his face inches from mine, his eyes fierce, right to the bed and tosses me roughly onto it.

His breathing is tight, like he’s trying to control himself, because I’m watching his hands fist and open, fist and open, again and again.

My grin is gone now too, and I don’t have a chance to scoot away before he’s on his knees on the bed and gripping my thigh with one hand—I’ll have bruises like fingerprints there too, to match the ones on my jaw.

He traps my legs with his, knees pressing against my thighs, and he climbs on top of me, capturing my hands when I fight him, taking my wrists into one of his giant hands so easily.

I’m raging, screaming at him, cursing him to hell, cursing his family to hell, using every ounce of power in my body to wriggle away, to at least make him work for it, but he’s just too strong and I’m no match.

I finally stop because I’m exhausted. I look up at him looming over me. He wipes his thumb across his lip and looks at it, at the smear of blood there.

“That was a f*****g mistake.”

“You have no right to touch me. To kiss me. Let me go!”

“After I’ve been so patient with you.”

“Patient?”

“You don’t get it.”

He takes the hand with the smear of blood on it and tugs at the mound of hair between my legs, and it f*****g hurts.

“You belong to me,” he says.

He must be making a fist with his hand because he’s pulling so hard.

“You’re hurting me!” I’m powerless to move, to make him stop.

“I haven’t begun hurting you,” he says as he moves his fingers, giving me a moment of relief before he slides them lower and grips my p***y hard, digging his fingers inside me.

I make a sound, a whine, a moan. I don’t f*****g know.

“You belong to me, Helena. I am your master. I decide when you eat, if you eat. I decide when or if you sleep and in whose bed. I decide if you’re allowed clothes. I decide if you’ll scrub my floors. I decide everything. Me. I am your f*****g master.”

“Stop. Please.” It comes out a plea, and I hate myself for it, for the tears sliding out of my eyes. For being afraid of him. Of him like this.

“I decide when you’re rewarded, and I decide when you’re punished. And I should warn you, I have a taste for the latter and you’re already owed. More than once.”

I swallow, and I’m squirming like a tiny animal, helpless. Like a f*****g rabbit caught in a trap.

“I own you, body and soul.”

“No. Not soul. Not that.”

He pulls his hand from my p***y, and I can breathe again.

He brings it to his nose, and his smile grows so f*****g wide, I want to kill him. To smash his perfect teeth in, his perfect face, and I feel myself burn with humiliation when he smears his wet fingers rudely across my face, my mouth.

I smell my scent, that of arousal above all else. He smells it too, and he wants me to know it.

“You have sharp teeth and a sharper tongue, but I’ll break you of those. I’ll make better use of your mouth, like I will your p***y and your ass because I own every hole. And you will know that you are nothing. Nothing but my f**k toy. And you know what else, Helena? I’ll take the greatest pleasure watching you come. Watching you as you realize your body will betray you. Your p***y will betray you. It already has.”

“I hate you. I’ll fight you.”

He brings his face to mine, and that grin is still there. “And therein lies the reason it was you and not your meek Barbie doll sisters.”

He sits up, squeezes his thighs around mine one last time, then gets up off the bed.

I remain as I am, lying there, spent, every muscle on fire like I’ve just run a f*****g marathon.

But then he draws my pocketknife out of his pocket and opens the blade.

“So I’ll give you a notch for that little stunt.”

He catches me by the hair, drags me to my knees on the floor, and turns my face into the bed, pushing it into the mattress and holding me there by my hair.

I feel the sharp tip of the blade at the back of my neck, I let out a cry and grip the blanket, pulling hard.

“Be still. You don’t want me to slip up.”

It stings, every centimeter of the cut. He’s carving a line into the back of my neck.

Warm blood runs down my spine. I hold still, like he says.

“There,” he says, releasing me.

“What did you do?” I touch my neck, and my fingers come away bloodied.

He looks at the blade, wipes it clean with his finger, closes it, and tucks it into his pocket.

“I like it when you fight, Helena. I want you to fight. To run. To try to hurt me.”

He glances at his forearm, where tracks of skin are missing from where I scratched it off, and I suddenly am very aware of it under my fingernails.

He looks back at me. “Because it’s so much more fun when I have to make you.”

“You mean when you r**e me?”

His jaw tightens. He wasn’t expecting that. I know he’s gritting his teeth. I’ve touched a nerve.

“And then pass me on to your brothers to r**e me?” I continue.

“Be careful.”

“Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that the point? You take a Willow Girl, and you beat her and you r**e her, and you break her so that when you return her, she’s already dead even if you don’t kill her.”

I sag against the bed, and I’m not fighting anymore. There isn’t any more fight in my voice, because that last part, I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Not for his sake, but my own. Because with those words, I’ve just read my own death sentence.

He’s quiet for a long minute, just stands there and watches me wipe the stupid f*****g tears from my eyes. When he steps toward the bed, I lean away, but he stops, doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t touch me.

“You want to keep your soul? I’m not interested in your soul. But don’t f*****g push me. I am your only ally in this house. Remember that.”

I snort. “My ally?”

“Now get up and clean yourself up Have a shower. Lunch will be sent up in twenty minutes, and the doctor will be here at two o’clock.”

“What?”

He walks to the door and only stops once he has opened it.

“What doctor?” I ask.

How many humiliations can he put me through? We were all checked already, my sisters and I, to make sure we were intact, as the doctor called it. Virgins. He knows I’m not. He knew it when he chose me.

“Birth control. I won’t father a Willow Girl.”