Page 17 of A Murderous Crow
He smoothed a hand down beneath the comforter over me, and up under the shirt I wore underneath. The feel of his hand on my skin sent a conflicting wave of sensation through me. I shuddered, and I swear every hair I had stood on end. He pressed over my solar plexus, and I cried out with the pain of it, “Ow!”
“Let me see,” he ordered as I pushed his hand away and he pushed back the blankets. I immediately covered my chest, and he chuckled.
“Suppose you don’t remember these hands all over you in the bath last night,” he said. “You didn’t complain then.”
I felt myself blush violently, as the memory, faint as a whiff of perfume from another room, passed through my head behind my eyes of those hands buried in my hair, thick with suds as he’d washed it.
I swallowed hard and said, “I told you my name… You drugged me!”
“A little GHB to calm you down and make you compliant. Rest assured, it’s out of your system by now.”
“Whoareyou?” I demanded, aghast, and those eyes of his turned molten with his… anger? I didn’t know what to call it, but the look he gave me made me fear and feel all of three inches tall.
“Right back at you. Nowlet me see,” he ordered, and I moved my hands. He popped the three buttons holding the shirt I wore closed and parted the expensive fabric just enough to see, but kept two sides closed enough to cover my breasts. There was a terrible purple-red bruise down low, in the notch below my sternum, where things went soft and my ribcage met in the middle.
I tried to strangle my gasp, but it came out as this sickening little noise that made it seem like I was about to throw up.
“He got you good,” he murmured, and he didn’t sound happy about it.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Let me spell it out for you then.” He quickly buttoned the shirt I had on, and I blinked, wondering how he’d done it one-handed and so swiftly, as he still lay beside me, his other hand propping up his head.
“You saw a side of me that no one should see, last night. You’re privileged enough to live to tell the tale – but you won’t,” he said. “If you talk, and I’ll disappear you, just as quickly as I disappeared your assailant.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “So, you’ve bought my silence.”
“I want more than just your silence,” he said.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You,” he said. “At least until I grow bored enough to let you go.IfI grow bored enough to let you go. You know how indentured servitude works, don’t you?”
“It’s a form of slavery,” I answered. “Lasting for a period of time, traditionally seven years, until your debt is paid off, and then you receive your papers, and you are free to go…”
“Yes, well, thatwashow it worked,” he said.
“This isn’t that,” I said. “There’s no such thing as slavery anymore.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” he said, and he sniffed. He’d been holding his free hand, just above me, trailing it over my body as though he were feeling the nervous energy coming off me.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“You’re mine to play with, to lick, to suck, tofuckas I want to until I get bored,” he said. Thewayhe said it had part of my libido sitting up and saying,uh, YES please!While the rest of me positively recoiled in horror. It was an interesting dichotomy.
“You don’t know anything about me!” I argued.
He grinned, an almost feral thing, and said, “You’re right, I don’t, and I don’t care. I like what I see, and I take what I like.”
He rested his hand on my hip, and I batted it away, off me, like it was a spider crawling on me, which made him burst out laughing – loud and raucous like a murder of crows, the timbre of his voice richer and deeper somehow.
“This is sick,” I whispered aghast, and he gave me a lopsided grin.
“Then I’m a sick man,” he said. “But don’t pretend you aren’t aroused, or that you aren’t squeezing those thighs together at the thought of me getting between them. Because I may be a sick man, but I’m an honorable one, mostly, and honor abhors deceit, and I really don’t like liars.”
“If I say no?” I asked.
“You’re in no position to say no,” he said. “Or did you forget you’re an accessory to murder?”
