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Knowing that and accepting it aren’t the same thing.
I lean forward to kiss her. Maybe it’s an apology of sorts, but I find I’ve met her threshold of tolerance when she bites my lip so fucking hard I taste blood.
Chapter 26
Lauren
If he comes back at me with soft shit like he did when he brought me to Mission, I’ll lose my fucking mind.
I’m barely holding on to my sanity right now as it is.
Instead of striking me, a slow smile spreads across his face, his teeth marked with his blood from where I bit him.
I can’t determine which guy he is.
Is he the man he was in El Salvador, the one that whimpered when I stuck my hand in his jeans and stroked him?
Or is he the man that just fucked me while tied up with no regard to what I went through recently?
Is he a combination of both?
Does he want to kiss me or does he think that’s what I need? Is it a way to show his own remorse?
I don’t want any of it. I don’t want his compassion or guilt. I don’t want to be responsible for his feelings on any level.
I have to look away from him, and for some reason, this time, he allows it.
I hate myself almost as much as I hate him right now.
Despite my pain, despite the ache in all of my muscles, despite knowing I was drugged and abused, he knows just how to fuck me.
Maybe I should feel my own form of guilt over that, but I can’t seem to muster it right now.
Long ago, I stopped worrying about how I go about getting what I want. It doesn’t matter to anyone else how I punish or pleasure myself, nor how those two things most often go hand in hand.
I accepted my fucked-upness long ago, and concerning myself for how others perceive me isn’t part of who I am.
“Let me go,” I tell him in a flat tone when he pulls back and slips his cock back into his pants.
He doesn’t listen to me. Rather, he situates me back on the bed, taking his time and chuckling again when I fight him, as he ties my hands back to the bed. I have almost no strength in my arms or legs, and it makes me wonder how high the doses of the sedatives were that he gave me.
The IV bag, still hanging by the bed, is plain with nothing written on it so it doesn’t provide any clues as to what those drugs were. I don’t ask because I know he won’t tell me. He likes to torture me with the unknown.
I hiss when his fingers pinch at my nipple, just barely managing not to clamp my legs together. I don’t want him to know he left me needy. I nearly died of embarrassment when he cleaned me on the toilet. It gives him too much power, too much control. Not that I think he really cares how I’m left—wanting, hurting, begging. So long as he gets his pleasure from my body, the other shit doesn’t matter.
He bought me with the lives of the three men who were holding me captive. He owns me. At least that’s how he sees it.
I want him to go into detail about their deaths and how in the hell he even found me, but I doubt he’d give me that information.
Then I remember him telling me about my termination from the FBI.
“Did you tell them where I was?” I ask, more fearful that they’ll come and take me away than wanting them to find and rescue me.
It says a lot about who I feel is the real villain in my world, but I can’t focus on that right now.
He scoffs. “They’re dead.”
“Not the men who took me. The FBI. Do they know where I am?”