Page 58 of Girl Anonymous

The ass. He had all the faith in the world she wouldn’t slit his throat. She could. She would. She’d do what she needed to do to make her point…as it were.

She gripped the stiletto with a Maleficent smile. Slipping the blade into his neckline, while he flinched, she pulled and jerked and cut the buttons.

When she put the point of the blade to the skin over hisheart…he laughed in a kind of exaltation. “What a woman I’ve chosen!”

Which made her fingers clench on the bone. Did he not comprehend how much she longed to carve him into little pieces? “I cannot bechosen.”

“Yet here you are.” With another one of those sleight of hand gestures, he pulledla Bouteille de Flammefrom somewhere up his sleeve. Stepping away from her and the blade, he set it on the dresser and turned on the lamp.

The glass caught the light, warming to a crimson glow.

When he returned to her, she tensed, preparing for him to grab her wrist, and thinking what countermove she would make.

Instead, hands relaxed at his side, he stepped right into the tip of the blade. “You have two choices now. Consummate our marriage. Or cut out my heart.”

CHAPTER 27

Maarja couldn’t look away from Dante’s face: his faint confident smile, the gold that flowed beneath his bitter-brown eyes, the determined jut of chin, the carved stone of his bones.

“That’s not a choice!”

“In our world, it is.”

“It’s not our world, it’s yours!”

“You are a Daire.TheDaire. You are one of Jånos’s tribe. Think what you like; you were born to this world, same as me.”

“You don’t think I’ll use this knife on you.”

He toed off his shoes. “I have no doubt you will do it in the right circumstances. But I’m not afraid to die, and you won’t kill to preserve your own skin. For you to kill, it’s got to be a higher cause.”

Was that true?How could he know that about her when she didn’t know it herself?

He moved forward, slow enough to not impale himself on his own knife, but fast enough to challenge her. “Two choices, Maarja. Blood and freedom. Or sex and knowing you’re bound to me until the day we die. Because you’re mine.”

Her eyes narrowed. His insolent assurance pushed her to the edge of a precipitous cliff. She put pressure on the tip of theblade, just enough to bite into his skin over his breastbone. Blood welled up, trickled down.

He no doubt felt the pain, but he didn’t seem surprised, and he didn’t stop, maneuvering her toward the giant bed. He added, “And I’m yours.”

She came to a halt.

He came to a halt.

He shrugged out of his shirt. His hands went to his belt; he unbuckled and unzipped, dropped his pants and stepped out, closer to her.

The knifepoint slid farther beneath his skin. It bumped up against hard bone.

“Mine.” She tasted the word. He claimed her and wanted her to claim him. Possession worked both ways…if she agreed.

She looked him over.

He was beautiful. A Viking’s body: tall, long-limbed, with warm brown skin marred from previous battles…and the explosion that killed his father. His face, stony cold and without expression, could frighten a woman if she failed to look deep beneath the surface, but Maarja saw what drove him: the metal-sharp resolve to extricate himself and his family from the endless cycle of vengeance and murder. He had the intelligence to do it; all he needed to do was outmaneuver his enemies, to make them reveal themselves so he could neutralize them.

He trusted her to be at his side.

For a good reason—she’d risked her life to save his mother.

And for a stupid reason—because he’d taken her virginity.

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