Page 8 of Prince of Control

The breath leaves me in a whoosh. I’m suddenly lightheaded. Shocked and slightly turned on.

“Why?” I demand.

A slight tension radiates from his shoulders. When he answers, the words are flat and emotionless. “You’re my wife.”

Chapter Two

Baron

After stopping at the courthouse to get our marriage license, I take my bride to Baranov House, or the Gulag as it’s known on campus. Lara gave me the cold shoulder for most of the trip, and I didn’t try to warm her up.

I’m not the charming guy–that’s Anders or Leo.

I’m the one who strategizes and keeps his mouth shut. The guy who stays five steps ahead of everyone else, so I can control the outcomes around me. My mom calls it PTSD. I call it being a leader.

Right now, I have a lot of mental plans to reconfigure. I need to figure out how to protect an unwilling bride. I’ll have to control her to keep her safe, but I have a feeling she’ll fight me tooth and nail.

My brain flashes to installing her permanently in the house dungeon.

Yes, we have a dungeon downstairs. It’s why Baranov House is known on campus as the Gulag. Rumors about it are wild, and I encourage all of them. Some say it’s a bratva torture chamber–the place we bring our enemies to exact revenge.

Others know–it’s a sex club.

We almost never allow outsiders to enter it, which raises the mystique of the house to epic levels. Nearly every partygoer here spends the entire time trying to get invited downstairs. That’s what enables me to charge exorbitant amounts of money to people on the nights we decide to allow invite-only entry.

Those who are invited sign NDAs and then are sworn to secrecy with veiled threats.

I find people’s imaginations work far better to control behavior than any threat or promise I could make.

I imagine stripping Lara out of her clothes and fastening her wrists and ankles to the St. Andrew’s cross. Teasing her with the perfect application of intermittent pleasure until she goes mad and begs me for a release.

Or even better, a genuine relationship.

But I’d settle for her orgasm.

It’s a delectable thought.

But of course, locking her up against her will won’t work. I’ll have to tempt Lara into the dungeon the same way I do the rest of the world–by denying her entry.

In the meantime, I’ll keep her close, so I can watch over her. My original plan was to bring a contractor in to divide my large bedroom in two. But I’m glad I didn’t have time to make the call.

My bride isn’t sleeping anywhere but in my bed.

If her father thinks she’s in so much danger he sent her here within days of my agreement, I need to take her protection seriously. That means keeping her close.

Making the marriage appear real to anyone who observes us.

I don’t examine the more personal reasons I have for wanting her in my bed.

I park in the driveway next to Leo. “This is our place.”

She sends a wary look at the house, as if it might suddenly animate and attack her. “Our place?”

“Not just for us. There are twenty members of the house. Twenty-one now, with you. Come in. I’ll introduce you.”

I take two of her suitcases and carry them to the front door, using my thumbprint to open the lock.

Half of the house members loiter in the living room. This is my version of the communal brotherhood my father cultivated in the Chicago high-rise where many of us grew up.