Page 12

CHAPTER 12

Sienna

“ D amn it,” I bark and immediately reach out to turn up the knob on the water heater.

I sigh in bliss as the hot water pelts over my skin and does a little to relieve the tension in my muscles. I can’t count how many showers I’ve taken since I was thrown in here and abandoned.

Well, it’ll serve Vin—no, I have to stop thinking of him as businessman Vincent. He’s cold-blooded murderer Alessandro, and it’ll serve him right when I run his water bill up to six figures.

In the absence of activities to keep me occupied, I spend all my time trying to get into the books in the room and taking endless showers. I’m cleaner than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve considered drowning myself in the tub once or twice.

First off, I’m too much of a coward to kill myself, and secondly, I’m not giving that asshole the satisfaction of knowing he had broken me so much that I did his dirty work for him.

I begin to rap under my breath as the water pushes out from different directions. I make a mental note to beg for some source of music. Even an iPod will do.

After several minutes in the shower, I turn off the water and step out, grabbing two fluffy white towels.

While one goes around my body, I use the other to wring my wet hair. A glance in the mirror reveals what a mess my hair is, and I make a face. I need my hair products and a diffuser, not just a lousy hairbrush and hair ties.

My gaze shifts down to my neck in the mirror, and I brush my fingers over the device locked around my throat. I hate it so much. It’s the worst humiliation I’ve ever had to face—being collared like a flight risk mutt.

With an irritated grunt, I march out of the bathroom and immediately freeze as I take note of the man lounging on one of the room’s chairs.

“What are you doing here?” I bite out, crossing my arms over my chest.

The move causes his stormy blue orbs to zero in on my chest, and I self-consciously tuck the towel tighter around myself.

Water drips from my still-wet hair and begins to soak the fabric that’s hugging my body.

Alessandro is perfectly still in the chair, except for his eyes, which trail leisurely down my body. The hooded look in his eyes is enough to make me want to run screaming back into the shelter of the bathroom, but I steel my spine and stay rooted in place.

“Don’t you have people to stab in the back? Cocaine to snort? Children to kidnap from the neighborhood park?” I ask with a raised brow. “I’m surprised that with all that on your daily agenda, you still have time to visit me.”

“Don’t you miss me, Sienna?” He sounds amused, and I grit my teeth.

I want to lash out at him and say he shouldn’t say my name like that. That he shouldn’t turn my respectable name into liquid seduction, slipping past my defenses, but instead, I just give him a closed-lip smile.

“The day I start missing you, you can drag me kicking and screaming to the nearest mental hospital,” I reply snidely. “Speaking of mental hospitals, if you’re going to kill me, do it and get it done.”

His eyes sharpen, and I’m not sure, but it feels like all the air is being sucked out of the room.

“And why is that?” His voice is so low that I barely catch the words.

I nudge my chin up and do my best to stare him down. “Because I’d rather go out with my dignity in place than go crazy in here. In all the ways I imagined I would die, I never factored in dying of boredom.”

“Oh?” Alessandro breathes. I narrow my eyes, trying to pick up a tone in his voice, but it’s completely lacking in inflection.

“Put a gun to my head and end it,” I growl. “I’m tired of your games.”

His knuckles turn white as they tighten on the arm of the chair. “This isn’t a game, Miss Marino. And you don’t get to be tired. You’ll continue to run on the hamster wheel until I say otherwise.”

“It’s D’Addario,” I correct.

“What?”

“My name isn’t Marino.”

“I’ll call you whatever I want,” he snarls. “I’ll decide when you get to die and if you get to live, what clothes you’ll wear and what foods you’ll eat. I’ll do whatever I want with you because you’re completely at my mercy.”

I know it’s just my imagination, but the collar seems to tighten at his words, making me feel even more trapped.

“If you don’t do it, then I will,” I roar at him, waiting for him to lash out. His lack of reaction is drawing out a leashed madness inside of me. I’m angry, I’m frustrated, terrified for my father and myself, worried sick for him, and bored.

All of it is driving me off the edge, and yet here he is. The man responsible for making me like this is sitting here calm as a cucumber and looking every inch like a suave and refined gentleman in the dark turtleneck and grey pants that are molded to his body.

“You’ll do what exactly?” Alessandro asks.

“There are a thousand ways to ruin your master plan,” I say with a shrug. “It’s not as foolproof as you imagined it.”

Blue eyes lock on mine, all traces of lust gone.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I continue, “I suspect your master plot won’t be all that satisfactory without your key players.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“Well, by all means, enlighten me then.” He spits the words like they’re something foul, and I furrow my eyebrows, confused.

“The bathroom mirror,” I say after a minute of silence spent waiting for him to elaborate. “I can break it and slice my own carotid.”

“How morbid,” he drawls. “Fortunately, I’ve taken the precaution of installing a tempered glass mirror. But you’re welcome to try a hundred other ways of killing yourself. We both know you’re too much of a coward to do it.”

“If there’s anyone who’s a coward here, it’s you,” I spit, furious that he’s saying the same thing I just thought to myself earlier.

He rolls his shoulders in a nonchalant shrug, but I can see the way the corners of his eyes tighten, telling me he’s not as unaffected by the words as he’s trying to show.

“Also, you being dead or alive does nothing to derail my plans. Don’t think you’re a major player in this game, Sienna,” he says bluntly. “Your life isn’t as valuable as you think. You’re, at best, a side character. A supporting piece. Replaceable. Irrelevant.”

The cruel words reverberate through me, and I still. It took me years to work through my feelings of being unimportant to my father, and I thought I had left that far behind, but suddenly, I’m thirteen-year-old Sienna again, begging for Papa’s attention while he buried himself in work and then crying in the library.

The memory plays before my eyes, bringing a flood of past feelings with it. I wasn’t enough for him after my mother passed. It felt like he only loved me because of her, not because of who I was. It was why it was so easy for him to ship me away so he could drown in his grief. While he was mourning my mother, I was left to battle something no child should have had to.

Irrelevant.

The word echoes in my head.

And I wonder for the millionth time if my father would care about what happened that summer.

“If you die today, Sienna, it won’t change anything.” His voice snaps me back to the present. “I’ll throw your body into a pool full of piranhas, and I won’t stick around to watch what becomes of you. But the prosecutor won’t know you’re dead. He’ll continue his fruitless efforts to find you.” The bastard cocks his head, looking thoughtful. Then, he adds, “Come to think of it, maybe that’s the best solution.”

I tuck some of the hair that’s crowding my face behind my ear, and his sharp gaze follows the movement before coming to linger on my mouth.

I blink at him, and for the first time, I wonder if one day, that barely hidden hunger in Alessandro’s eyes will boil up to the surface. What will make a man like him explode?

Thoughts like this are dangerous, I know, but I cannot help but feel annoyed at the fact that he’s so casual about all this. He speaks about my death like it’s as mundane as a phone battery dying. Nothing seems to faze him.

“Perfect then,” I say stiffly. “How generous of me to become a willing sacrifice in your grand scheme. Do it. Kill me. Put a bullet through my head and toss me in with the cannibal fish. It beats having to look at you.”

A dry chuckle escapes him. “I remember when you called me the most handsome man alive.”

“That’s when I thought you were a businessman who was interested in my art, not a man who tosses out threats to use me as fish food,” I snap back.

“Don’t tell me, Sienna, you’re one of those people who say that beauty lies on the inside.” He’s clearly mocking me.

My hands clench, fingernails biting into the flesh of my arm. “Your insides are rotten. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

“Well, I do live to disappoint spoiled little girls.”

I’m a full-grown woman who worked for every dollar in my bank account, but far be it from me to argue about who I know I am with a man whose hands were stained with more blood than an entire nation’s army. His opinions of me are useless.

“You clearly don’t know me,” I inform him coldly.

“Don’t I?” His mouth tickles up in one corner, and then he does something unexpected.

He reaches for something at his back and then produces a gun, holding it in the air between us. Looking at me, he takes his time turning off the safety before placing it on the table beside him.

“Take charge of your own destiny.” He nudges the gun forward. “Shoot me or yourself. Either way, you will have done something more than whine and wait for Daddy Dearest to come save you.”

Suspicion makes my brows draw together, and I glance at the gleaming metal. My father tried to get me to take shooting lessons. I only went once due to almost having a mental breakdown about actually hurting someone.

Alessandro is right, and we both know it. I’m a coward, and I can’t take what he’s offering. I can’t take control. At least not like that.

He watches me closely, his gaze intense. The flash of heat in his gaze makes my throat feel suddenly dry.

And then it hits me.

With a shaky breath, I untangle my fingers from where they have a death grip on the knot of my towel, and I ignore the way my heart is drumming against my chest.

As he eyes my movements, the curl of his lips disappears, and I feel a smug sense of achievement as the white fabric drops to the ground soundlessly.

“Sienna.” My name is a warning on his tongue, and if I have two brain cells to rub together, I’ll cover myself back off and flee from that incinerating gaze.

This is reckless, stupid, and out of character.

My hands are clammy, and my nipples are as hard as bullets. But I stand my ground.

Electric blue eyes drink me in like I’m an oasis after months of walking through sandy dunes. A single drop of water falls from my hair down to my collarbone, and I watch greedy eyes follow the trail of that innocent-looking droplet, down, down, down, until it falls on my ample bosom.

I hear him curse silently.

“What are you doing, Sienna?” he asks, his voice tight.

“Showing you who’s in control.”

“You’ll regret this,” he growls, his eyes darkening. I can see his chest swelling with labored breaths, a savage glint in his eyes.

“The only regret I have is meeting you.” His gaze is still on my heaving breasts. My nipples are tight and pointy with their hard peak. For a moment, we seem to be the only ones who exist. Nothing else matters. We’re paused in time.

Then he glances back up…and there’s a shift. Something palpable, carnal…and so damn animalistic.

I feel it, he feels it, and we both know what’s about to happen. We’ve danced around this for too long. It’s inevitable.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to give you another reason to regret meeting me then,” he says with a smirk.

One second, I’m watching him, and the next, he’s prowling toward me and dragging me roughly against him in a fierce kiss.