Page 8 of If You Love Me

Nervously, he rubbed his thighs.“I wanted to look good when you woke up,” he stated, staring at me.He leaned into me and stroked my hair. “How could you just leave me, Lisa? You said we’d be together forever, then you just up and left me. We were so good together, baby. Can’t you see that?”

“I’m not Lisa,” I whispered.

“Liar!” he bellowed. “You can’t trick me!”

“I’m not trying to trick you! I just want to go home. Please, I have a little girl that needs me—”

“You—you cheated on me?”

I frantically shook my head. “No.”

“You had a baby. You had my baby.”

“No. She’s mine.”

“She’s ours. Where is she? I can go get her and bring her home.”

Again, I shook my head, my voice trembling as I spoke. “She’s mine. You can’t have her.”

He frowned. “First you leave me, now you wanna keep my daughter away from me?”

“She’s not yours!” I screamed. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t know who Lisa is, but I’m not her. Please let me go.”

He stared at me for a moment before angrily flipping the tray of food over. I screamed, but he clamped a large, callous hand over my mouth. He leaned into me with angry eyes.

“You can’t leave me. Not again. I’ll just have to keep you to myself until you learn to love me again.” Gently, he stroked myhair. “You can love me again, can’t you, Lisa? I’ll be good this time. I promise.”

He removed his hand from my mouth and pressed a kiss to my lips. I wanted to throw up.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” he said, stooping to pick up the contents off the floor. “I’ll go fix you another plate.”

Without another word, he left the room, leaving me alone. Tears streamed down my face as I lay there praying to God that someone would find me somehow. This couldn’t be real. Things like this didn’t happen to me. I was minding my business and trying to make dinner for my family. There was no way that a trip to the grocery store turned into me being run off the road and taken by some strange man who thought I was his wife.

I shouldn’t be here.

I should have been home with my husband and my child… my husband and my child. Oh, God! What was Tyrion going to think if I didn’t come home? What would Summer Rose do without me? My baby was only six months. I’d barely got to watch her grow up, and now, we’d been taken from each other.

I had to get out of here.

Some way, somehow, I had to get out.

Now

It was eerily quiet.

The type of quiet I wasn’t used to. I mean, the room I was in was soundproof, but something just felt… weird.

Leon, my captor, was always going on about something. In the last ten years, I’d grown to hate him even more than Ithought was possible. When he first took me, all I did every day for weeks was sleep and cry. All I wanted to do was go home, and since I couldn’t do that, I just wanted to die.

I refused to eat, so he force-fed me.

When I say force-fed, I meant he put a feeding tube down my nose while I was strapped to the bed. I refused to bathe, thinking that he was going to try and touch me. That was until he took it upon himself to bathe me one night. After that, I handled my hygiene, deciding that I would just have to put up a fight if it ever came to that.

There had only been one night where he forced himself on me. I screamed and cried so bad that he never touched me again. There were other nights he would come into my room while I was sleeping and watch me. I’d wake up, and he’d just be standing there looking down at me. He never spoke a word; he just stood there until he was ready to leave me be. A few times, I woke up to him lying next to me, sound asleep.

Those nights, I didn’t sleep at all. I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, wishing I was home. I missed my husband. I missed my baby girl. Knowing that she was growing up without me hurt me to my soul, but it gave me strength to stay alive. One of these days, I was getting the fuck up out of here. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know when, but it was going to happen.

I rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom to handle my hygiene. Leon had converted his basement into an apartment-like setup for me. While it was soundproof and there were no windows, it was actually pretty nice. I remembered when he brought me down here a few months into my stay.

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