That edge isn’t there now. There’s something sinister lurking in his expression, and the eyes he’s looking at me with now make me find it hard to believe this is the same man from the last few nights.
It can’t be the same man who painted me and told me I was his dream.
It can’t be the same man who called me his and told me I belonged to him.
It can’t be the same man who stood before me and became my husband.
But it is.
This is what he looks like when he’s been lied to.
I need to say something. Anything.
I need to say something… even if it sounds foolish. It will be worse if he speaks first. I’ll look much worse than I already do.
“What’s happening?” I mutter. My words are barely audible. “Why are we down here, Mikhail?”
“This is where I bring people to interrogate them. No one can hear them scream or suffer down here. Down here, they don’t see the light of day. Often, they never see it again.”
“Is that what you want to do to me?”
“We’ll see,wife.”
I fight back tears and will myself to be strong.
“It turns out a lot was happening right under my nose and the joke was on me the whole fucking time.” His eyes blaze with fury, and his nostrils flare. “I have a penchant for telling when someone is lying, but the trick is, it only works if I ask a specific question. Now, I asked you everything under the sun that I could, except the one thing that could have screwed with me. I never asked you your name.”
The air expels from my body, and the blood freezes in my veins.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What was that?” He rushes up to me and grabs my arm, then he holds up the piece of paper so I can see it.
The paper shows a picture of me with all the details of everything he was never supposed to know. My name and my listing for sale in the virgin auction.
He knows the truth. The confirmation makes the gravity of the situation strike me a hundredfold.
This is the moment I feared.
“You’re sorry!” He rips the blouse I’m wearing off me and tears off my skirt. “You’re fucking sorry?”
“Stop it!”
“Fuck you. Fuck you for doing this to me.”
“I’m so sorry, Mikhail. I’m so sorry. I thought you were going to kill me.”
“You were right to think so.” He tears off my bra and panties next and shoves me against the wall that hold chains running through a loop.
“Please, forgive me. Please… I’m so sorry.”
“No.”
I scream when he catches my face and holds me down while he grabs my wrists and binds my hands to the chains above my head.
I’m crying so hard I can barely see. He steps back and looks at me with vengeance in his eyes, and I know I’m dead.
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” he says. “You truly had me fooled. Had I only asked you your name, I would have known straightaway that you were lying about who you were, Natalia de Leon.”
