Page 21

He’s made it increasingly clear that watching me is his full time hobby. I’m not sure how he manages to get anything else done.
Ever since I texted him at the bridal shop about having to force a woman to marry him, I’ve been a bit subdued, worried he’s keeping a list of things I do and say that “displease him” and how I might pay for that later when the facade of the Prince coming in to save me from a life of being poor has evaporated to reveal the ugly beast beneath.
Despite how he seems to be trying to woo me, Erica has reminded me about forty times now that he’s a dangerous player in the criminal underworld. He commands a vast empire of money and resources and power. Every time she says something like this she sounds like an evil tour guide. She may be horrified, but a part of her is also fascinated by it all.
I’ve tried searching on the internet for a current photo of Aidan, but he is a ghost. It’s like any evidence he ever existed has been wiped off the entire Internet—if it was ever on there to begin with. It seems his family was very concerned about privacy and security from the infancy of runaway tech and acted accordingly while they still could. the Stryker corporation has a PR person who answers press questions for the front-facing part of the company, though they try to stay out of the news. They don’t seek PR in the same hungry way that most companies do.
They don’t want the attention even though I’m certain they have police and politicians on their payroll. It occurs to me that Aidan is sacrificing the anonymity he’s built, keeping his face out of the paper and off the Internet just so he can claim me so publicly. I’m not sure what that means. It feels like a huge sacrifice just so he can rub my face in his triumph. He wants to make sure I can’t hide from this. It isn’t enough for him to have me. He needs the whole world to know he has me, even if it means nothing to them, and they don’t know our backstory.
Anyway I’m sure they’ll spin it into something innocent, like that I was his childhood crush or something. If anyone ever knows any part of our history, it’ll be whitewashed into something far less sinister than it was so that rather than pulling back in horror, people will just say “awwww, that’s so sweet.”
With as successful as the Stryker corporation is, you’d think they could just drop the criminal element, but do any of the movers and shakers in the world truly have clean hands at this point? Aren’t they all kind of crime lords past a certain point of wealth?
If I were a heroine in a romance novel, I’m sure my book would be called… The Captive Bride of the Crime Boss. The overly descriptive title… it’s simple. Easy. We know what we’re getting. It’s like boxed macaroni and cheese. It’s comforting in a way.
And I know what Aidan is doing with all these gifts after such a long period of struggle. He’s trying to be macaroni and cheese. He’s trying to be that warm fluffy blanket I want to snuggle into. He wants to be the satiny soft petals of the rose, so I forget about the thorns.
My room is filled with vases of roses. The entire house is full of roses. There is no escape from them. They die and get rotated out, but it isn’t fast enough to prevent having to accept some of them into my room.
I put on the headphones and insert one of the cassettes into the player. I listen until dinner while I continue to write in my journal—a journal I will likely burn before the wedding. I just need to get all this out, I don’t need someone else to come behind me and read it, least of all Aidan. And maybe that’s why I’m keeping the journal, because for all his fancy surveillance, he’s not actually physically in my room, and he can’t know what I’m writing. It’s my one space of peace and privacy from him.
I hope it drives him crazy.
Seven
Maddie
I listened to the cassettes until dinnertime and texted my list to Aidan. I tried not to think about how my chosen songs would fit so well with the style of the flowers and reception venue—as though I somehow cared about any of these things. I tried not to think about how a small part of me is excited about the event, if not the man.
Now the house is quiet and dark. Everyone is asleep except for me and my new shift of guards out in the hallway. I lay in bed staring up at my ceiling where I still have the glow-in-the dark stars from my childhood.
I don’t know why I never took them down. It’s so stupid that I have them still. I’m twenty-seven, for god’s sake. But I’ve spent years staring up at them, thinking about things when I couldn’t sleep, and I was just never able to fully let them go. And after the IRS came, I definitely wasn’t taking them down because they were the last normal thing I could rely on.
I can’t sleep in pajamas. I sleep too hot. I need to have sheets and blankets directly against skin. So now I get in bed and undress under the covers so his cameras don’t catch me. I’m lying in bed like this now, staring at the drawer that contains my toys.
I need an orgasm so bad I can’t think. I glance at the clock. It’s one a.m. I’m sure Aidan is asleep. I’ve been lying here for well over an hour. There’s no way he’s watching me right now. He has to sleep sometime. And there is nothing more boring than watching a person sleep.
I slowly move my hand under the covers and slide the drawer open. I take out my favorite toy, careful not to flash whatever night vision cameras he has hidden around the room.
I wait several minutes, my heart thundering in my chest, the oval-shaped hot pink toy gripped in my hand. It has a suction on the end that sucks on my clit and produces the best orgasm of any device I’ve ever tried. It plugs into the wall to charge, and I pray it still has enough juice to get me through because I haven’t charged it in weeks.
When I press the power button, I’m rewarded by a very quiet vibration, muffled further by the blankets. Are his listening devices sensitive enough to hear this? Will there be a tiny spike somewhere on some electronic device that picks up the sound? I don’t know how extensive his set-up is.
I let my mind drift to the guy from the alley. I can’t believe I’m still fantasizing about this guy, but he’s the stand-in that keeps me from thinking about Aidan. He’s the dark fantasy that I’ll probably never see again, whose reality I don’t have to deal with. I think about those tattoos, the intense way he looked at me, his hand stroking the side of my neck and through my hair. I can almost still feel the way he touched me that night. I can still smell that rich woody cologne if I focus hard enough.
I think about how my fear and adrenaline mixed with arousal. The fear that he might do something and the fear that he might not until the spell was broken, and the light turned green. Every time I think about this, I add new details, details I’m not sure are even real memories, and then the fantasies that I know aren’t. The fantasy that instead of going through that green light and taking me home, he took me down a side road and parked the car in another alley, that he ordered me to strip for him and fingered me until I was a hot wet mess before pulling me into his lap forcing me to impale myself on what I’m sure is a very large dick, taking my virginity while the rain beat down on the windows.
I slide the toy into place against my clit and am careful to stay quiet. My breathing picks up pace but I force the moans to stay inside me. I’m careful not to jerk my hips too hard, not to make any sudden movements, to just let the pleasure wash over me while staying on the knife edge of the tension of needing to remain so still and quiet.
My phone buzzes, but I’m too far into this. I can’t stop now.
It’s probably just Erica. But this late? It can’t be him. There’s no way he caught me. But I have to know.
I grab my phone off the bedside table.
It’s about time.
My hips move with the toy, I can’t stop them.