Page 16 of Cruel Pawn (Cruel Duet #1)

Priya

T he first thing I became aware of was warmth pressed against my skin, trying to lull me back to sleep with its comfort. The second thing was a severe lack of clothes. Huh? I didn’t sleep naked. Why would I—

Freddo, tortured and murdered, with his dick cut off.

A cloth doused in chloroform, then darkness.

Arden.

I lunged upright, my eyes flying open—and cried out at the blunt pain in my shoulders. A rattle of metal made my blood ice over.

“Careful, careful.”

That was his voice, warm and sultry and decadent.

I clenched my jaw, ignoring the traitorous fluttering in my chest. I tried to lift my arms again, carefully this time, and confirmed my suspicions—I was chained to the wall.

No. The ground was too pillowy beneath me, a softness cradling my body that was so much worse than bare concrete would have been.

I opened my eyes, and my stomach dropped.

I was chained to a bed.

“Don’t try to escape, my opera,” Arden said, coming into view.

I had to fight to keep my breathing even, a sharp, clawing sensation in my chest. What would he do?

He had me tied up at his mercy. The last time we were together, I slit his throat and tried to kill him.

Would I die tortured, just like my parents?

I couldn’t see much of the room behind him, just a dim impression of a wide, open space, enough to make me think this was a single room.

It was appointed in dark greens and sumptuous tans; I glimpsed a window covered in thick velvet curtains, and maybe the dark cupboards of a kitchen.

Where the fuck were we? This wasn’t Arden’s glossy, multi-million-figure apartment in Mayfair.

“What are you going to do to me?” I demanded, my panic mounting like a wave that would crush me under its pressure. It was a cliché question, but I needed to know if I was preparing myself for torture or death.

“Keep you,” Arden replied, startling my heart to knock against my ribs as he leaned over the foot of the bed. A memory of him standing over my bed once before flashed through my mind. I ignored the ache that began between my legs. “I’m going to keep you forever and ever.”

I blinked, the only sign of shock I allowed to show. He wasn’t going to kill me? Instead, he was going to keep me locked up here, fuck knows where, as—what? “As your twisted sex slave?” I asked on an expulsion of air, an incredulous laugh.

“Is that all you think you are to me? Sex?”

He came closer, and I had no choice but to look at him, so I finally allowed myself to catalogue his features.

Raw, sharply honed beauty was usually softened by a smile, but now he frowned at me as he crawled onto the bed, his heat hitting my naked body like a bolt of electricity.

His hair was a few inches longer, falling rakishly over his forehead, a lock curling into his eye, and there was a crackle of danger to him that was new. An intensity that made my heart pound.

I looked for the slice I’d half-made on his throat, and everything inside me ground to a screeching halt when I found a perfect slash of a scar. It had pink and red hearts inked around it.

He’d surrounded my murder attempt with fucking hearts, like a schoolgirl’s notebook doodles.

“You’re not my slave, Priya. You’re my heart and soul. My future wife. My reason for existence. My dream for the future. You’re everything.”

The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “You know my name.”

“Yep.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “I know everything now. Sorry it took me so long to find you. I thought it’d only take me a week to track you down when I went back to your flat and found you gone, but you’re very good at hiding, my opera.”

“I…” Fuck, I was speechless. He kissed my cheek, and my entire body responded.

It felt like I caught flame, fire licking across every last inch of bare skin.

I must have lost my mind because I still wanted him.

I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of how well he’d fucked me.

It had branded my brain, burned its memory into my psyche until it was part of me.

I hated admitting it, but even now I wanted him again.

The rush of disappointment when he slid off my body infuriated me.

My stomach curdled, a hot splash of rejection in my gut.

He literally kidnapped me—drugged and kidnapped me and chained me to a bed.

Now was not the time for my rejection sensitive dysphoria to make an appearance.

I didn’t want Arden to want me anyway. He’d been a target, a job, nothing more.

But he took you to the British Museum, a small voice reminded me, as if I could forget. He took you, not Carmen.

I hadn’t been able to forget that either.

Everything else was part of the con, but that night was real.

He saw my book and took me to the library because Alice in Wonderland was important to me, and it was like a barnacle that clung to me, refusing to be pried off.

The knowledge that he’d done what no one else had done and noticed me.

I didn’t even want to be noticed. I wanted enough money to find my parents’ killer and I wanted revenge. There was nothing beyond that.

“You must be hungry,” Arden mused, oblivious to my inner turmoil as he jumped off the bed and seemed to bounce across what I saw now was a living room with a rich forest-green, velvet three-seater sofa and a matching chair, both plump and inviting, scattered with black cushions edged in lace and a single white-fur cushion.

This room, house, whatever it was, was like a gothic nerd’s dream. Dark and sumptuous, as tempting as it was sinister. Even the kitchen Arden skipped—I mean it, skipped —into was dark and foreboding. Who decorated this place? Bram Stoker?

“I made sure to stock the cottage with all your favourites,” he told me. “It wasn’t easy getting through your laptop’s pesky little defences; that kept me away from you for a week when you could have been here, all mine, for seven entire days. But I needed everything to be perfect.”

“He’s fucking insane,” I whispered to myself, pushing myself as far up against the headboard as I could, ignoring the luxurious glide of pure silk against my naked body.

Shutting out the way it felt like adoring hands on my skin.

Pretending my core didn’t throb at the suggestion, at the memory of Arden’s hands all over me.

Fuck, how soon could Stockholm Syndrome set in?

But no, I was safe, I didn’t love him. I just wanted him inside me again.

Completely normal horny girl problems. And who could blame me when I knew exactly what he was capable of?

When he looked like a walking wet dream.

When he’d kidnapped me and chained me to a bed, like some dark, twisted fantasy come to life.

It was messing with my head. I pressed my thighs together, trying to calm the ache in my clit.

He was definitely a psycho, and undoubtedly dangerous.

I’d never known I had a type before. And learning my type was psychopaths was bad enough, but learning it like this?

Any normal person would be screaming and pleading to be let go, sobbing, falling apart.

Instead, my brain must have been wired wrong because I’d jumped right past my normal destination—planning his murder—and ended up on the intersection of Take Me Now Lane and Fold Me Like A Pretzel Avenue.

I blamed the chains.

“Pretty girl,” he said, startling me back to the present. “You were miles away. What were you thinking about?”

I didn’t reply. Wouldn’t.

He paused by the sofa, halfway to me with a bowl on his hands and— fuck, why did that smell so good? I had to bite back a groan. It was like cumin seeds, chilli, coriander, tomatoes, and rich, mouth-watering meat. It was like—

“Is that…” There was no way he knew my favourite food, right? There was no way he could have found out that my mum used to make it for me every Friday because it was my all-time favourite and the recipe was passed down from my great-grandmother.

“You better not have been thinking about him.” Arden’s voice dropped low and vicious so suddenly that a tingling warning crept down my chest. I drew in another breath, filling my lungs with the scent of home, of family, of safety.

A time of happiness, before I lost everything, before I saw the photos of their mangled bodies, before Grandfather began training me.

“Is that aloo gosht?” I asked in a too-small voice. The contract killer vanished, the woman who’d devoted herself to revenge swept away.

“Don’t change the subject, my opera,” Arden snapped. “Were you thinking about him?”

It showed how insignificant every other man on the planet was because the only man I could think of right now was Arden. I shook my head, confused. “Who?” Silvio and Grandfather were the only men in my life and—fuck, what if Arden know about Silvio? What if he’d hurt him or—

“Frederic,” Arden spat, the name like poison on his tongue.

“Oh, him,” I said, attempting to bat my hand and violently reminded that I was chained up. “No. Why would I think about him?” I wanted to laugh, but the look on Arden’s face as he came closer advised me against it.

There was a dark storm within those features, tightening his skin until it clung to the vicious edges of his jaw, his chin, his cheeks.

His eyes were narrowed and hard, a brown so dark they could be black.

My heart skipped in warning. I could well believe this man had a hit out on him.

Gone was the happy-go-lucky cat dad who would never harm a fly.

This man was danger personified. Violence wrapped in black sweats that really ought to have made him appear less threatening than his designer suits but somehow had the opposite effect.