Property Of A Monster

Take My Name

Chapter 2

The car door slammed and Mary hit the seat hard, her shoulder cracking against the window. Her phone buzzed in her lap before she could even catch her breath.

Lorenzo's hand closed over it before she could.

"Give that back." Her voice cracked on the last word, panic bleeding through the anger.

He didn't answer. He tilted the screen toward the streetlight sliding past outside, reading it with the same flat calm he'd have used to read a contract. Mary's stomach dropped when she saw whose name lit up the top of the message.

I'm leaving if you're not coming. Again.

Lorenzo's mouth curved, slow and unbothered, like her whole life was something mildly entertaining. "Oh. Your boyfriend."

"Give it back." She lunged for it and he simply lifted it out of reach, not even looking at her.

"Your little meeting's canceled today." His eyes cut to her, grey and unreadable in the dark. "You're coming with me."

"I don't even know you. You can't just, "

"I just did."

Her hands were shaking. She glanced at the door handle, gauged the speed of the car against the blur of streetlights, and made a decision her body committed to before her brain finished it. She grabbed the handle and shoved.

Lorenzo's arm shot across her before the door had even cracked an inch, hauling her back against the seat so hard the air punched out of her lungs. His hand pinned her wrist to the leather, his other arm locking her in place, his face inches from hers now, close enough that she could see the muscle working in his jaw.

"Don't." One word. Low. Final.

She went still, chest heaving, eyes burning with the kind of fear that has nowhere left to go. She was already regretting it, the door, the jump, all of it, the second his grip tightened and she understood exactly how easily he could have let her fall.

Neither of them spoke after that. The car ate up the miles in silence, her pulse hammering in her throat, his hand still loosely curled around her wrist like he wasn't finished deciding whether to trust her yet.

The tires screeched against gravel and Mary's head snapped up. Iron gates swallowed the headlights, and beyond them rose a mansion so massive it blotted out the sky, stone and glass and floodlights carving harsh shadows across manicured hedges. It looked less like a home and more like a fortress built by someone who expected war.

The car stopped. A man in a dark coat wrenched her door open before she'd even processed they'd arrived, and cold night air hit her face like a slap.

"Boss." The guard's eyes flicked to her, assessing, dismissive. "We should kill her. She might snitch."

The words landed like ice water down her spine. Mary's whole body locked up.

"Wait, no, please." The words tumbled out of her before dignity could stop them, her hands lifting on instinct, palms out, a plea and a surrender at once. "I didn't see anything. I mean I saw, but I won't say a word, I swear, please, I can, "

Her mind raced for anything, anything, to make herself worth more alive than dead. Her gaze snagged on the dark stain still crusted along Lorenzo's shirt where her bandage had held.

"I'm a nurse. Your wound needs monitoring, it could get infected, I can take care of it. Please. Just let me help. I don't need to know anything else."

Silence stretched long enough that she could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. Lorenzo studied her the way he might study a hand of cards, weighing every angle of what she'd just handed him.

"Leave us," he said finally, and the guard melted back toward the gates without another word.

Lorenzo stepped closer, close enough that Mary had to tip her head back to hold his eyes. Up close in the floodlight, the grey of them looked almost silver, and just as cold.

"You have two options." His voice was quiet now, which somehow made it worse than shouting would have. "You marry me, or you die."

Mary's breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat. "That's not, you can't, "

"Choose."

She looked past him at the mansion swallowing the sky, at the guards who wouldn't meet her eyes, at the gates already sealing shut behind the car. There was no version of tonight where she walked back out the way she'd come in.

His hand closed around her arm, firm, unhurried, already leading her toward the doors like the answer had never really been in question.

"You marry me," he said, "and take my name."

The doors swallowed her whole