Page 22 of His Darkest Obsession

“You won’t.” He continues to step forward. “Because this is the only way to keep you safe.”

“Safe?” I scoff I continue stepping back. "How is it keeping me safe by forcing me to marry you?"

My back hits cold, unfeeling glass, and there’s nowhere left to go. The walls seem to close in all around me. My throat closes up, and the thumping in my chest starts getting faster and faster.

"No one's forcing?—"

“Bullshit!”

I don’t know how the word exploded out of me like that. I know that if I don’t draw that line in the sand now and let him know that I’m not just some porcelain doll he can boss around, I’ll never get another chance to do that.

It’s not my own sense of self-preservation that caused me to shout my defiance at him so openly. And from the way his eyes flickers momentarily with just a hint of impressiveness, something tells me that he doesn’t think so either.

To my surprise, he stops and looks at me with fresh curiosity in his eyes just as fresh warmth starts spilling into my chest

“Don’t bullshit me about what you’ve done and what this is,” I snap, holding onto that unexpected thread of courage and anger. “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“I would never lie to you,printsessa,” he replies.

“Then tell me why you changed your mind. You were ready to kill me yesterday. What changed?”

Questions that I’ve been dying to ask come out like daggers, and I hurl them at him as hard as I can and as quickly as I can.

“Because I wasn’t the only one who was sent to kill you,” he says. “Andyouknow exactly who wants you dead.”

My stomach twists. In the back of my mind, an awful baritone voice—rich and smooth—starts whispering from my worst nightmares. It pours icy fear against the fire burning through my veins. Fighting the urge to shrink back anymore, I square my shoulders and jut my chin out at him defiantly.

“Does that satisfy your question?” He asks.

I don’t answer him. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing more than what he already might know. Let him guess for all I care. He doesn’t get to know the truth.

He doesn’t get to know my guilt.

But my silence is an answer on its own, and he leans back, satisfied with my inadvertent confession.

“My sister? What about her?”

“You told her to go somewhere else, didn’t you?”

I bite my lip. “And what did she say?”

He reaches into his pocket, pulls out my phone, and holds it up to my face. There’s a single text from Amara. What little of the preview I can see confirms that she’s going to go to her friend’s place after school.

She’s written more. But Anatoly pulls the phone away before I can read it.

“I need to know what else she said.”

He gives me a look that’s halfway between annoyance and amusement, and he holds out the phone to me. As soon as I press my hand on it to unlock it, he yanks it back.

“She wants to know what’s going on,” he reads. “She wants to know how long she should stay for. And she wants to know if you’re alright.”

Guilt claws at my chest. Oh, Amara… I wish I can tell her that this will all be over in just a few days, and that I’ll be home before she knows it. But if Anatoly is telling me the truth, then Amaracan’tgo home. Not for a long time.

And I have no idea if I’ll be alright.

I have to answer her.

I reach for the phone without thinking and he catches my wrist in his powerful hand. I feel a flutter moving through my stomach as the pad of his thumb draws a tiny circle on my skin. He slips the phone back in his pocket.