The flash in his eyes is almost sad. “Again.”
“Haze,” I say, rolling my hips again, and feeling his hard length against my core. “Fuck.”
“Is that what you want?” he asks, pushing his hands higher up my body, dragging my dress along with it. “Tell me what you want, Lina.”
I let my head fall back. “Yes.”
That is definitely what my body wants.
I pray my intuition isn’t wrong this time.
There is something more about this monster than meets the eye. Maybe he will set me free.
52
Lina
This man, this monster, I once trembled before… Now, he is on his knees before me.
I stand over him with more power than I’d ever thought possible.
Never once have I felt like I had true control over my future. Yet, right now, I feel powerful. It’s intoxicating.
I don’t understand him. None of this makes sense, but the truth is written plainly on his face.
He desires me. And he has the key to my escape in his grasp.
I pull my dress over my head and pant desperately as I stand in utter vulnerability, fully exposed to the very being I’ve most feared my whole life.
“Have you been with a man before?” he asks as he examines my naked form like a man starved.
I nod.
“One?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Two.”
Anger flashes across his face, and he clenches his fists into the soft skin of my thigh. I shouldn’t like that, but somehow, I do.
“Who,” he growls.
Lucca pops into my mind, and for one moment, fear and rage and pain that I’d felt when these same monsters took my friend from me, when they whipped him and tore him away, flashes through me.
Am I disrespecting his memory by letting one of them have access to my body? He isn’t taking it; I am giving it. Does that make me powerful or weak?
“A childhood friend,” I answer. “And a ranger.” I don’t much like thinking of Hunter. He was a passing phase. Perhaps he was a hope that life could be normal in this crazy world. He turned out to be a mistake I do not intend to rehash now.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No,” I answer. Not physically, at least. I may have given Hunter a bloody nose once when he didn’t want to take no for an answer, but he never harmed me. Not really.
“Then, tell me what you like. I will only do what you want.”
Neither of my experiences were anything like this. Lucca was good and kind, but it was both of our first times, and it was awkward. Wonderful but awkward.
Hunter was more of a taker than a giver.
“I don’t really know,” I answer honestly.
