Page 38 of Ruthless King
“Perhaps you don’t want our game to end?” he suggests, running his tongue along his lower lip. Switching to Italian, he says, “Tell me your name. I’d fuck you senseless if that’s what you want. Just give me your name.”
Anger flashes through his gaze at my silence. He palms the armrests again, and the furniture creaks as he leans forward, bringing his nose within a hair’s width of mine.
“Perhaps your aim is to drive me insane?” he wonders, letting his breath baste my cheek. “Fuck. It breaks my heart to tell you this,tigre, but I’m already there. I lost my mind years ago. You think to torment me? I live in torment.”
His large hands move to my waist, grasping at the skirt of my dress. Grunting, he tugs. Cold air assaults the flesh of my stomach before I even process what he’s done—rip my dress open, baring my front fully to him.
His irises look blacker in the dim lighting, adding a harshness to his features the man in my memories lacked. He’s a stranger, hunched over me. A stranger who smells like home and feels so familiar my body is a slave to the contours of his fingers, unable to sense the danger in them my brain is all too aware of.
His hands find my hips, so large they nearly overlap as he lifts me from the chair and shoves me onto the desk nearby. Limp, I fall back, forced to stare up at him, still trying to reconcile this man with the specter who has haunted me all this time.
Donatello, the man whose face I used to fall asleep picturing while imagining all the ways I’d kill him. Get my revenge. Make him regret leaving me. Forgetting me. Erasing me.
In this moment, those childish fantasies die. The little girl who conjured them is forced to grow up, faced with the ravages of time.
“Now, this is a skill I’m sure your employer won’t approve of,” he scolds, fanning out his fingers over my waist. The touch distracts me from his words, and I shiver as his thumbs toy with the waistband of my panties, threatening to slip beneath the thin lace.
“Pity,” he continues in a harsh tone that doesn’t match the unsteadiness apparent in his trembling fingertips. “How can someone like you feel pity for a poor bastard like me? Don’t deny it. It’s written all over your face. You may hold your tongue, but your eyes…” He inhales sharply as if tasting the word, relishing the flavor of it. My eyes. He might as well be drooling over my soul. “Those eyes give you away. I see you clearly. In every way, I see you.”
He sounds so earnest. He truly believes that, every word… While the truth’s twisted irony grows the longer he lets his touch linger over me. The more he looks. I think it’s the inherent wrongness that leaves me so riveted despite the indecency.
He sees me, his Safiya, right beneath his nose. Maybe he never really knew me. Never really cared.
Something in his gaze shifts as if he’s reading my mind, and he shakes his head.
“No. No! You don’t look at me like that.” He curls his fingers around the waistband of my panties in cruel retaliation for insulting him. “Like I’m the one toying with you, when you… You provoke me in the worst way. A lesser man would kill you for desecrating what you’ve tried to.”
He brings one hand to my throat, toying with the thrum of my pulse. His thumb finds a spot Mischa taught me to recognize—a vital artery. He presses down directly over it, hard. Harder…
“Would anyone even care if I killed you?” he wonders in a cruel whisper. I brace myself as he lowers his weight over me, hovers his mouth above where his thumb still lies. “You are at my mercy. Tell me your name, and I’ll let you go. Or gasp. Whimper. Anything to prove it. I’m begging you. I’ll get on my knees if that’s what you fucking want.” He chuckles madly at the thought of it. He sounds mad. Earnest. A man at his wits’ end with nothing to lose. “Prove to me you are not Safiya. Or… Prove to me you are her.”
He frowns as if he doesn’t even understand the question leaving his mouth. He tilts his head, his breath hot on my cheek, his hips pressed hard against mine, dominating the space between my legs.
“My Safiya wasn’t a fighter,” he says near the hollow of my throat, still pressing so hard I feel lightheaded. “She loved me like… She loved me—” His voice breaks, triggering an unexpected pain lancing through my chest. It builds and builds, spreading up my spine, setting my eyes on fire.
“She loved me,” he insists. “And do you know what I did to her? What I let happen to her? My Safiya? My sweet girl…”
Lace rasps against my hips, ruthlessly dragged over the tops of my thighs. I remember how to move, lurching against him, swatting at his hands.
“I sold her.” His eyes are unfocused, staring into space beyond me as his strength easily overpowers what little resistance I muster. He cinches a fistful of my panties and tugs. Fabric tears, making my stomach lurch before cool air replaces the thin barrier, and there’s nothing to shield me as his touch roams. He palms my thigh, and I go rigid again, my thoughts spiraling.
“I offered her on a silver platter to men who would tear her apart.” His voice goes hoarse with dread. Guilt. Agony. “I let them hurt her. God knows what they did to her.” His mouth finds the crook of my shoulder as his hand inches higher. Higher.
I pummel him, trying to clamp my thighs against the intrusion.
He doesn’t even flinch, so lost inside his own memories, I doubt he can feel anything. “I killed her in so many ways,tigre,” he whispers into my flesh, sounding like a broken man, a world apart from the ruthless finger prodding between my legs.
My lips part, my breathing harsh on the air. It’s an impulse I haven’t done in years. Try to scream…
My nails dig into the flesh of his forearm as he brushes his thumb against me. Soft. Harder, forcing my flesh to conform to the pressure. Fire ignites my cheeks. I know what happens between a man and a woman. I am well aware of the physical act my parents so obviously enjoy.
But rumors, or my classmates, or what snippets of romance I glimpsed in books made it sound so blasé. So simple.
This is punishing. Relinquishing your body to another. Feeling them force their way inside despite the sheer limitations screaming that it’s unnatural. They could never fit. Even a finger is too much. Too big.
“Ah…Sì,” Donatello declares in triumph. “You may hold your tongue, for you are not Safiya,” he states, drawing back so suddenly my head swims. “Count your blessings on that. I may be a fool. I may harbor pathetic hopes of her bestowing her forgiveness upon me from beyond the grave—but I am not that naïve.” He steps back, adjusting his askew suit jacket. Cold, his eyes sweep over me. “Go back to your employer, whoever he may be. Tell him that you failed. But know this…”
He starts for the door and pauses over the threshold, his back to me.
