Page 11 of The Bratva's Forced Kidnapped Bride
It just made me burn for my freedom even more. Once I was out, I would bring the entire force of my family down on him. No more acting on my own. They could watch me make him pay.
But why was he letting me in on all this top-secret and highly inflammatory information? He had to know how badly it was pissing me off and bolstering my resolve.
I found myself openly staring at him and didn’t avert my eyes when he turned to stare at me. On top of everything else, I was overcome with curiosity. Was any of what I was reading real, or was he just feeding me bad information? Nothing made sense, so I just blurted out the question. Why?
His answer froze my insides. I wasn’t going to live long enough to use any of it, real or not. Yes, he was toying with me; that was clear. But one way or another, I’d end up dead. Just like August and Vik. The look on his chiseled face as he told me I wouldn’t make it to our one-year anniversary almost made me slide off my chair with terror.
I was a dead woman walking. Or sitting and doing paperwork. The satisfaction that all but made his steely gray eyes glow had me turning away, returning to my task, and pretending he didn’t exist until my fear was under control.
The thing that took me a long time to figure out was that I’d always feel fear. I used to go into fights furious with myself for being afraid of what might happen. Looking at my older, male cousins, who seemed to be made of blocks of ice, I couldn’t understand how they could be so brave all the time. I started being reckless, and Mat took me aside to ask what was going on.
“You almost got us all killed back there,” he said, way back when I just turned eighteen and was allowed my firstundercover assignment. “I told you to stay behind and not blow your cover.”
I had panicked when the shooting started and rushed in with guns blazing, killing someone Mat had wanted to interrogate, and doing just what he said, blowing my cover so that I was no longer useful in that particular operation.
Pissed off to the point I was fighting tears, I asked him how he never felt any fear. “I try so hard,” I admitted. “But when I thought you and Dan and Rurik might be in trouble, it was too strong. I had to do something. Anything.”
“That will be the thing that gets you killed if you don’t learn to control it,” he said, holding up his finger before I could argue. “I didn’t say learn to stop it. You’ll always feel fear. You think I don’t? Or Dan and Rurik don't? Of course we do. You can’t stop feeling it, but you can learn to push it aside and ignore it.”
That was what I did now, pushed aside the fact that Anatoli meant to kill me, probably painfully, and went back to furiously blacking out important swathes of text on the papers in front of me. Hatred and anger were so much more helpful than fear in my current situation, and he got too much enjoyment out of watching me squirm.
Pretty soon, he realized what I was doing. His hand wrapped around my wrist, and he jerked my arm away just as I was about to redact an entire section about the Collective’s most recent whereabouts.
“Are you stupid? Or crazy? Or both?” he asked in a low rumble so his men wouldn’t hear.
I glared at him, reaching for the marker with my left hand and scribbling all across the page. Childish? Maybe. Maybe even crazy and stupid. But this man wasn’t going to see fear in myeyes again. I kept staring at him, unblinking, until his free hand raised. Would he finally strike me?
Instead, he lowered his hand, gave me the briefest shake of his head, almost like he was disappointed, then dragged me out of my chair, his grip tight around my arm. No one looked up, but why would they? No one there would dare move against the big boss, and no one cared what happened to me. I was the entertainment, and it looked like the show was finally about to start.
Instead of acting then and there, he hauled me out of the room, dragging me down the hall. He kicked open the door, revealing stairs that led down into shadowy darkness. The fear rushed back like a stampeding bull, prickling all along my spine and tensing my muscles. He wasn’t going to share the pleasure of making me pay for everything I did to him when he was my captive, and it was somehow worse than being surrounded by enemies. One was enough. Anatoli was more than enough to make me suffer.
Shoving me against the wall next to the stairwell, he loomed over me, much too close. Much too big. He was at least eight inches taller, and I didn’t want to calculate how much muscle mass he had in his favor. The man was a brick wall. And damn it if he still didn’t smell intoxicating.
Before I could head butt him, he had his hand on my throat. Not choking me, only holding me in place, as if he’d read my intentions in my eyes, which he kept locked with his. I didn’t dare look away, hypnotized as if he were a venomous snake.
He leaned even closer, our bodies touching, the heat of my panic blazing between us. I could feel his breath on my cheek, feathery soft. The weight of his hands, one still restingagainst my throat, the other pressed against my shoulder to pin me to the wall, was light, but I still couldn’t move.
What was he going to do? Why was he holding back? I wanted to scream in his ear and deafen him, but my throat was dry as the sparse desert grasses, and my lips refused to move.
Push it aside.
But it wasn’t just fear that had me paralyzed. There was something else I didn’t understand. Something familiar, but it couldn’t possibly be that. Closing my eyes against his gray glare, I pushed it aside. I could move again and twitched, ready to heave my knee up into his soft bits. He was ready for that, too, and jerked me so close our bodies collided. Okay, not so soft. Not soft at all.
“I don’t think so,” he growled, his arm wrapped around my back to keep me pinned to his very hard body.
The hand that rested against my throat tangled in my hair. He tugged my head back so I had to look at him. The best protection against an enemy, besides a gun, was knowledge, but I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes as he searched my face. There were too many flashes of too many emotions for me to catch them all. I finally had to jerk my head to the side, making him laugh.
There was no humor in it, only a low, grating noise. Stepping away, he pulled me back down the hall, away from the shadowy stairwell leading down. It was as if I’d been trapped underwater too long, though I was sure I hadn’t been holding my breath. It took everything I had to keep my legs from collapsing underneath me as he dragged me… where? What was the next destination in his game to terrify me to death?
It was the kitchen.
Once in the airy, modern space, too flooded with afternoon sun from the tall, sliding glass doors to be the least bit frightening, he released his iron grip on my arm. With a gentle shove, he sent me further into the room.
“Eat some lunch,” he said, turning on his heel and leaving me alone.
What the absolute hell? I sank into the nearest seat, sprawling my arms onto the table and letting my head rest on them, completely spent.
The psychological torture was definitely working.
