“Keira, will you come with us?” Brigit asks, her gray eyes looking up at me in fear.
“I can’t right now. But I’ll find you. Listen to Nanny Fiona, okay?” I pull her in for a hug, but it’s a quick one as I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. “Go. Hurry.”
I watch as they rush to the end of the hall and disappear around the corner. The house is loaded with secret passages and tunnels. Some are from the original estate. Others, like the secret rooms in the attic, were added by my father.
“You!” A hand wraps around my arm and yanks me back.
“It’s the Keans’ daughter,” another man, who I recognize as working for John O’Donnell, says. John’s daughter wassupposed to marry my brother Ronan. Maybe if he had, we wouldn’t be in the mess. But Blaise Ifrinn killed him. And now Hannah O’Donnell is married to Ash Ifrinn, probably in a deal to secure the O’Donnells’ alliance against us. All of it has apparently led up to the overtaking of my home. My parents and I will certainly be dead before the night is through.
“Bring her down. We’ll hold her until Phoenix tells us what he wants to do with her,” the second man says.
The first man’s gaze leers over my body. “I know what to do with her.”
Why do men always think with their dicks? And why are sex and violence as close together as love and hate?
He tugs me downstairs and puts me in my mother’s parlor, and there I wait, and wait, and pray that no one finds Brigit.
It’s hours before a man enters the room. “Boss wants to see you.”
I imagine that’s Phoenix. He’s won, after all. I rise, keeping my head lifted as I follow the men through the house and down the stairs to the basement. I’ve spent ten years toughening up. Learning to be strong. Standing up when I have to and knowing when to back down. I won’t tremble for them. If I can arrange my freedom and Brigit’s, I will. If not, I’ll die.
I come around the corner and nearly stumble at my first look at Phoenix in ten years. For a moment, I’m eighteen and seeing the man I love. He’s older, thirty-one now, but I can still see Phoenix in his features. He watches me and for a moment, I think he’s back ten years ago too, but then his eyes harden, becoming dark, deadly, filled with hate. Now I don’t see Phoenix, the man I knew, at all.
I’m brought to him, and that’s when I see my parents imprisoned, my father on his knees. I won’t lie, I like it. Phoenix and his brothers have brought my father down and I’m glad of it. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to align with the Ifrinns. I stilldon’t know if they started all this by sending Phoenix to woo me as part of a plan to ruin my father.
I clasp my shaking hands in front of me, the terror of the moment finally catching up to me but not wanting him to see my fear.
He steps closer to me. "Your mother offers you to me like chattel. I wonder, would you willingly sacrifice yourself to save your family?"
I arch a brow, not at all surprised my parents would trade me for their lives. It’s that anger at all of them for treating me like chattel that has me saying, “You need a cow, Mr. Ifrinn?”
His expression stays cold and calculating. “I don’t.”
“But you need a wife,” Mother says. “You know how much more respect married men receive.”
He shrugs. “Maybe, but why would I marry the daughter of the man I just defeated? It looks weak.”
I can’t stop the stab of pain at his words. At one time, he spoke of love and marriage to me. Now he looks at me with the same disdain my parents do. No, not disdain. Pure hatred.
“Those who still respect Hampton will be forced to respect you since he approves of the match?—”
Father growls at Mother. “I never said?—”
“Let your wife finish, Hampton,” Phoenix snaps at him.
“And you’ll have a Kean under your thumb. Isn’t that what you want, Mr. Ifrinn? To humiliate us?”
I hate you. I hate you all.
"Marriage. A true union between our families." Phoenix’s gaze travels over me much in the same way that O’Donnell’s man had. I feel violated. Ten years ago, I’d have never expected Phoenix to look at me like that. At anyone like that. It proves how naive and wrong I was about him.
"You'll be mine in every way. No conditions, no escape clause. Your complete surrender in exchange for your family's lives,” he finishes.
Mother makes a small sound of triumph.
"Your parents will live, though imprisoned. But you…" He steps closer to me, close enough that I can feel the heat, the hate, radiating off him. "You belong to me. For me to do whatever I want, whenever I want."
I understand what he means. Like everyone else, he’s turned into a man who uses his dick to oppress and control women.
