TAKEN

CHAPTER 4

Helena

I do as he says, but only after sitting on the bed for a while and feeling sorry for myself.

I’m wasting tears on them, on my enemy. I’m weak. God, not twenty-four hours ago, I was staring him down, ready for him, wanting him to choose me only because I thought he wouldn’t.

But I’m pathetic and weak.

I get up off the bed and pick up the glass he left unfinished and drain it. I don’t especially like whiskey, but I force it down and pour more. Pour another, generous glass of the stuff. It’s inelegant, I know, but I don’t care.

I sit on the edge of the bed and drink it like it’s water, and when I’m finished with it, I crawl onto the bed with my hideous shoes still on my feet and lay down on my side and I cry some more.

He’s right. I need to get myself together. But first, I need to get this out of my system. Get my fear gone.

I look at my aunt’s ring. She thinks I’m strong, but she’s wrong. I’m weak. So weak. So opposite her.

When my mother sat us down on our sixteenth birthday and told us this part of Willow history, I swore I wouldn’t be the Willow Girl because it scared the f**k out of me. And as soon as I could, I made sure I wouldn’t pass the virginity requirement, thinking it would save me.

So yeah, I’m weak. A coward.

“There’s a reason it was you, child.”

I sit up, reach into my boot, and take out pocketknife. I’ve had it forever, but never even dissected a worm with it. I open it now, touch the sharp point, press it into the tip of my finger until I draw a drop of blood.

“They chose you, Helena. The Willow ancestors chose you.”

I wish I knew more about our history. I wish I’d studied the books in the library rather than pretending it wasn’t real. That it was an archaic tradition. That I was safe.

I don’t know what binds the Willows and the Scafonis. What has bound us for generations. When I was little, and my Aunt Libby returned home, we were told she’d been on a trip. I was too young to ask questions. That same summer, she slit her wrists on the old bed in the attic of the Willow family home.

I think the only reason my parents didn’t make up some story was because I’m the one who found her.

I remember I used to be afraid of the attic. Always thought there were ghosts there. My room was just below it, and the only reason I went up there at all was because the blood had finally dripped through a crack in my ceiling and onto my foot.

Drip, drip, drip.

The window was open. It was the hottest summer I remember. The air-conditioning didn’t work as well on the third floor, and it was hard to sleep in the heat.

When I woke up, I saw the drops of red on my foot. I remember thinking how strange it looked and wondering what it was when another drop fell, and I looked up to see the stain on the ceiling.

Every time I remember that night, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I went up there. Why I didn’t go wake my parents. But I didn’t. I took my flashlight and my teddy bear, and I climbed the creaky old stairs to the attic.

I remember when I first saw my aunt lying in that bed. I went over to her to ask her why she wasn’t sleeping in her room where it wasn’t so hot. That’s when I saw the pool of drying blood she was lying in. Saw how unnatural her color was, how gray.

She used to be so pretty whenever I looked at photographs of my mother and her sisters. Aunt Libby was the prettiest of them all in fact.

But not after she came back home from her years with the Scafoni family. They stole her beauty. Her youth. And ultimately, her life.

I turn the ring on my finger, look at the skull, the hollowed-out eyes, smear the droplet of blood over the bone.

It’s made of bone. How does someone do that? I turn it again and feel the three sharp tips of the amethysts.

“They chose you, Helena.”

I lay back down and close my eyes. I’m tired. I don’t think he’ll come back in here. I don’t think he’ll allow his brothers or mother in either. I do know without a doubt that Sebastian Scafoni is in charge of his family. Even his mother.

I just don’t know what that means for me.

When I wake up, I am again disoriented.

We’re no longer flying. I can tell before I even blink my eyes open because I no longer hear the constant, dull noise of the plane in the air. My mouth feels like cotton. I’m thirsty. Did we land?

I open my eyes and am startled to find myself in a large bed in a huge bedroom. The walls are a creamy white, and there are two windows against one of them. Heavy drapes the color of old paper are pulled closed, but the sun is trying to creep in from the split between the panels.

There is a large dresser that looks like an antique against the far wall and a sitting area with a lilac chaise. A small, round side table with three delicate legs stands beside it and another, larger one stands on the other side.

I sit up a little. The satin blanket falls away, and I realize I’m naked.

A peek tells me I’m completely naked.

Someone must have undressed me. Was the whiskey so strong that I don’t remember landing and don’t remember being stripped of my clothes after being carried into this room?

A momentary sensory inventory tells me I haven’t been violated—apart from this stripping of my clothes.

I pull the cover back up to my chin and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I switch on the lamp on the nightstand because apart from that strip of sunlight at the windows, it’s dark inside. The lamp is pretty, one of those Tiffany Venetian ones with a variety of colors of glass. The only other item on the nightstand is my pocketknife.

Whoever undressed me let me keep it?

I get up and tug the blanket off the bed, wrap it around myself.

There’s another door that I can see leads to a bathroom, so I go to it, creeping slowly, although I can’t imagine anyone’s hiding in there. And I was definitely sleeping alone.

Once I’m in the bathroom, I close the door and switch on the light. It’s big, big enough for a tub for two at one end, a separate stand-up shower, also for two, a walled-off toilet, and two pedestal sinks.

There’s a large window above the bathtub. It’s stained glass, and the sun casts a pretty purplish-blue light into the room. I discover it’s sealed, so it can’t be opened, and I can’t look outside to try to figure out where I am. Try to figure out how hard it will be to run away and disappear.

Although I can’t do that.

The tile along the floors and ceilings is a creamy white, and the fixtures are brushed nickel. A rack along one wall holds a dozen plush towels as well as a variety of shampoos, conditioners, body washes, oils, and anything else a woman may need.

And it is for a woman. Prepared in advance for the Willow Girl. I can tell from the smell of a few of the luxury products.

Wishing there was a lock on the door, I quickly use the toilet, then go to one of the sinks to wash my hands and face.

There’s a brand-new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste beside it. I unwrap the former, smear it with toothpaste, and brush my teeth as I take in my reflection, my bed-head hair, the shadows under my eyes. The fingerprints he left behind in the form of bruises along my jaw.

When I’m done brushing my teeth, I locate the wooden hairbrush I’d seen and work it through my hair, smoothing out the bed-head look. I set it down and open the bedroom door and stop dead in my tracks because the curtains have been pulled back to let in the bright sunlight and Sebastian is on the bed, in the space I just vacated, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, looking much more casual than he had last night in his suit.

Both of his arms are tattooed, which surprises me for some reason, and he’s leaning against the headboard and reading something on his phone, but when he sees me, he tucks the phone into his pocket. “Where’s my dress?” I ask.

He looks me over with the blanket wrapped awkwardly around me and smiles. He seems refreshed, like he got some sleep and had a shower.

“I took it off when I brought you in. I thought you’d be more comfortable naked.”

“You thought wrong. I’m not.”

“Did you take me literally when I said to have ten drinks?”

“No. I just had one. Maybe two. Was it drugged? Is that why I didn’t wake up when we landed? Are you going to keep me drugged too?”

He chuckles, swings his legs off the bed, and stands. “Relax, sweetheart.”

“I’m not your sweetheart. Where are my clothes?”

He picks up the pocketknife. “This? Really? Hidden in your boot?”

I walk to him and go to grab it out of his hand, but he pulls it away and grips my wrist with his other hand.

“It’s mine,” I say, twisting to pull free.

He’s too strong, though. I won’t be free until he decides to let me go.

“And now it’s mine.”

He pockets it and releases me.

I stumble backward.

He comes toward me, and I take a step away, but my back is to the wall. He closes his hands around my arms, rubs them once.

“I’m not f*****g stupid, Helena. You’ll only hurt yourself trying to injure me.” “I want my clothes,” I say, knowing he’s right.

“I like you like this,” he says, letting his eyes fall to my chest where the satin is wrapped so uselessly around me.

“Did you touch me too?”

“Not yet,” he says. “I don’t get off on bedding women who are passed out drunk.”

“You’re good with kidnapping though?”

“I guess.”

He’s so f*****g cocky, I want to smash his beautiful face in.

“Do you prefer us to fight? Is that it? I mean, what you do, you and your family? What’s the difference if the woman, the Willow Girl, is passed out or not? Maybe it’s easier on her if she is. I mean, let’s be honest here. I don’t imagine it’s your moral sense of—”

But I never get a chance to finish whatever the hell it was I was starting because he shoots one of his arms out and wraps his hand around my throat and he squeezes.

“Be careful,” he warns, leaning in close to my face, inhaling my scent as if he can smell my fear. He brings his lips to my cheek, and a moment later, I feel the scruff of his jaw along the shell of my ear. “Be very careful, Willow Girl.”

I shudder. His words are like physical things, three-dimensional and powerful.

He’s squeezing so hard that he’s lifting me on tiptoe, and I realize I’ve let go of the blanket and it’s slid to pool around my feet. I have both hands wrapped around his thick forearm, clawing at him, digging tracks into his skin, trying to drag him off me.

“Had enough?”

A garbled sound comes from my throat and one of my arms falls to my side. It’s only then that he releases me. I slide to the floor, gasping for breath, my neck tender.

He steps back. “Maybe Lucinda’s right,” he says, and I wonder why he calls his mother by her first name, but I don’t have time to think about it. “I should take you out to the post. Whip you now, get it over with. Is that how you want it?”

I look up at him. Is he serious?

Yes. He is. And he would. I mean, this whole situation, it’s archaic. Like we’ve gone back in time a hundred years. A thousand.

“Is it, Willow Girl?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You don’t like sweetheart. You don’t like Willow Girl. Tell me, do you need me to whip you?” he asks, nudging my hip with the toe of his shoe.

I shake my head, hug my knees to myself, and look straight ahead. Anywhere but at his mocking eyes.

“Get up.”

I shake my head again. I can see the goose bumps that have risen on my arms, making the faint dusting of hair stand on end.

“Get up, Helena. Don’t make me make you.”

I grab hold of the fallen blanket, but he steps on it. When I look up at him, his dark eyes are narrowed and intense.

“No blanket. I want to see you.”

Hasn’t he seen enough? I want to ask him, but I don’t. I can’t push him too far.

“I’m tired of repeating myself with you,” he says.

I rise slowly to my feet, covering myself as best I can with my arms, keeping my legs close together, letting my hair fall to shield me like I’m Lady Godiva on her horse.

He steps back a little, and the silence between us is heavy, like it can be put on a scale and weighed.

It feels like it’s sitting on my lungs, that weight, suffocating me.

“Look at me.”

It takes me a long minute to do so, to meet his slate eyes, and when I do, it’s like I’m in another dimension, another world.

It’s just him and me and this silence.

It’s too much. Too loud.

Deafening.

And as I study him, there’s something that won’t let me look away.

If I’d met him under different circumstances, I’d find him attractive, not scary, but it’s not that which has me caught like an animal in a trap.

He’s the hunter and I’m the prey.

He and I, we’re connected somehow, and maybe it’s our shared history or our bound destiny, this insane game we have to play out.

I don’t know what it is, but it is. It’s there. The ring on my finger weighs heavy.

Bone.

I suddenly know what my aunt meant.

The ring, it’s made of human bone. I know it.

I imagine my aunt in this room. I wonder if it looked the same then. If I’m sleeping on the bed she once slept on. I imagine her standing here, much as I am now, facing off with her Scafoni master, because that is what they are. What Sebastian is. My master.

The word boils inside my gut, and I fist my hands.

He steps closer to me, and I realize he’s been studying me all this time. He lifts my hair and pushes it behind my shoulders. He then takes my wrists, and when he wraps his hands over my fists, I see again how much bigger than me he is because my fists, they look like a child’s in his giant hands.

He doesn’t try to open them but sets my arms by my sides. When he touches my jaw, even though it’s a featherlight touch, I flinch.

He lifts my face slowly, turns it from side to side, brushes the bruises with his knuckles, presses against them like he’s fitting his fingers to the marks they left, making sure they’re his. Who else?

He then slides his fingers down over my throat, cups it again, and I panic. I clasp my hand over his forearm prepared to drag him off. To fight even if it means a whipping.

But he surprises me. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, his voice low but but not harsh. Not threatening.

He could threaten. He could do so much more than threaten.

He could throw me on the bed, force my legs apart, and take what he wants.

I have no power here.

Physically, I’m no match. I am alone in this house of my enemy.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeats.

And I surprise myself because I feel my lip begin to tremble, feel the flush of something—God knows what—at his words because they’re gentle and maybe I’m being f*****g stupid but maybe I just need to believe he means them. Even if they’re a lie, I need something to hold on to right now.

I let my arms drop to my sides, and when he swipes his thumb along my face and smears a tear across it, I let my lashes fall closed. He cups my face with both hands and pulls me closer.

“Look at me.”

I open my eyes and look up at him. He’s so close, I can see every speck of gold in his eyes and this, right now, it’s like I’m more naked than if he were to look over my body, if he were to lay me out and open me up and study every detail of me.

This is worse.

This… I can’t hold his gaze because this, now, him like this, it’s like he’s looking inside my soul.

And I’m letting him.

I blink, turn my face, meaning to look away, but turning it into his palm and for a single insane moment, I think I am safe here. Safe in his hands, in my enemy’s hands. I shake my head and with my arms, slap his off.

“You can’t have that,” I snap, more power in my voice than I thought I could muster.

He wipes his thumb on the corner of his mouth, like he’s wiping something away. Then his eyes narrow, and I’m back against the wall. I think he knows what I mean by ‘that’ even though I can hardly make sense of my own words.

You can’t have that.

He may be able to take my body, but he has no right to my soul.

I get the feeling he’s processing the same thing because he shrugs a shoulder and makes a point of looking me over slowly, as if letting his gaze memorize every inch of skin, the rise and fall of my breasts, the concave of my belly, the mound of my s*x, the curve of my thighs, the fragility of my naked feet even.