Page 67 of Captive Prize

Did that mean this was my chance to escape?

I wasn’t chained to anything, only his arm banded tightly around my waist. But if he was asleep, perhaps I could move it without waking him?

I turned my head slightly, just enough to meet his dark eyes staring down at me.

His hand moved to brush a lock of hair out of my face, his fingers trailing over my jawline and his thumb caressing my lips.

So much for sneaking away while he was asleep.

“Well?” I asked. “Does this mean you’re going to let me go?”

His lips twisted in a soft smile. Then he exhaled sharply.

“What do you think?”

I huffed out a breath of annoyance. The frustration simmered just beneath my skin.

Of course, he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. Why would he do that when he could just toy with me instead?

Rolling back over, I stared up at the ceiling. My eyelids were heavy. I would’ve given in to the need for sleep, wrapped in Roman’s warmth, even if it was just some sick little game, if the weakness hadn’t also been crawling up my limbs and hunger wasn’t clawing at my empty stomach.

My body ached for sustenance.

I needed food.

I had lost too much blood, and I needed protein, iron, and nutrients to replace what was now soaked into the sheets on the other side of the bed.

“If you’re not going to let me go, can you at least arrange to feed me?”

His fiery gaze stayed on my profile for a moment. The weight of it burned my skin until his arm tightened around me, pulling me back into his chest.

“What’s wrong,printsessa? Didn’t like my cooking?”

He had made that dish he fed me?

I ignored the way my heart skipped a beat, knowing that he had prepared that food for me himself.

Instead, I rolled my eyes. “I don’t even know what that was.”

He chuckled, the low rumble moving from his chest through my body. I felt it more than heard it.

“Ropa vieja. It’s a dish my mother used to make when she was homesick, or she thought that I needed comfort food. She said it would fill my stomach as well as provide important nutrition to my soul and connect me to my people.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Instead of some smart-ass remark or surface-level snark, he showed me something real. Something that I could tell by the timbre of hisvoice was important to him. I rolled in his arms so I could face him, look into those deep dark eyes for some sign that he was messing with me or joking. There was none.

“I never really knew my mother. My father killed her when I was young.”

I didn’t mean to say that.

Just because he told me something meaningful didn’t mean I had to reply in kind. But part of me wanted to. It was almost instinctual.

The words held so much truth. Not just facts, but the core truth of who I was as a person. They were so true, they felt foreign on my lips.

It wasn’t the persona I created, the badass bratva queen. The only surviving heir to my father’s empire. It had nothing to do with her; it was just me.

Just Zoya’s truth.

I hated giving him that, giving him a piece of who I truly was, of the girl that I tried so desperately to hide. To protect the way her family should have protected her.

---