Page 67 of Promise of Destruction (Destruction & Vengeance Duet #1)

sixty-two

Declan

Soren squirms against me, but I know she’s not actually trying to escape.

She’s putting up the fight that she feels she needs to give me.

I don’t know if it makes her feel better about fucking another man to try and deny me what she so obviously wants, or if it’s that she just likes the fight. Or maybe it’s the control.

That is a problem. Her need for control is excessive; it interferes with her basic needs, gets in the way of her survival instincts. Soren isn’t dumb, but she’s stubborn enough to do stupid things for the sake of not giving up her control. And that simply won’t do.

I slap her ass when she tries to wiggle out of my grasp as I fish from my pocket the set of keys Dimitri gave me.

The guest house isn’t all that Remy Boudreaux offered me access to.

When I took the phone, he thanked me for my help, as if I had a whole lot of choice in the matter.

But I could hear in the strain of his vocal cords as he asked me to stay long enough for him to get them that he really cares about the girls he’s trying to save.

I didn’t grow up with any siblings, but I’d have given anything to keep my mother alive for longer. I did give everything to try. I even hoped the devil would show up outside a train station and offer me whatever I wanted for the small price of my soul.

I didn’t meet the devil, but Jonathan Boudreaux was as bad as and I sold my soul to him anyway. I just didn’t get what I wanted out of it.

Remy offered me a healthy sum of cash, free reign of his home and property and everything in it, and the keys to the car and boat in case we needed to get out.

He didn’t have to say what we may have to evacuate from—whoever restricted my access to my own software is no more a friend to me than him. Less, probably.

“Put me down.” Soren yells the moment I wiggle the key loose from the lock and push the door open.

I tighten my grip on the back of her thighs, kicking the door shut and flipping the light on. I don’t know the layout of the house, but I head for the back of it. I’d settle for the couch—she’d look so pretty with her tits bouncing over an armrest—but I need a bed.

The first door I open is a bathroom, so I turn to the next one and flip the light on to get a look at what the room has to offer.

The bed looks comfortable enough, but the headboard is a bookshelf jammed with all sorts of books.

That’s not going to cut it, so I turn and let myself into the next room.

“Let me down, Declan!” Soren growls, right on time. I’m happy to oblige, taking a few steps into the room and slinging her in the center of the mattress.

She’s already trying to scramble into a sitting position by the time I press myself over top of her, caging her against the mattress.

Her intensity from five minutes ago is waning, uncertainty creeping in now that she’s no longer on the edge of glory.

I guess she’s just remembered our circumstances and the fact that I am not her husband.

I’m so much better.

Pinned beneath me, her lips parted like she’s thinking of saying something, she’s utterly at my mercy. I know she wants what I can give her, but more than that, she needs what I can give her. Freedom, pleasure, and vindication.

“You said my name,” I remind her, pressing my lips into the hollow of her throat, where my hands had been earlier.

“Because,” Soren gasps as I nip at her neck, “I was trying to get you to stop…”

I hook my fingers under the elastic of her pants and jerk them down without any resistance from her. I think she even lifts her hips to allow them to slip to her knees, which fall apart for me.

“You don’t look like you want me to stop.”

My fingers ghost over her hips and she drinks in a long breath that she seems afraid to let out, as if it will come out with my name on it again.

“We were… in the open…” She gasps as I push the shirt up over her stomach, deliberately letting my fingertips just barely brush over her creamy skin. I’m slow, deliberate, giving her time to marinate in this decision. I want her to understand the gravity of what is about to happen.

But for all her bluster, she doesn’t fight me when I slip the shirt over her shoulders and toss it to the floor, letting her pert breasts bounce free. She doesn’t realize I noticed when she took it off, taking it as just another sign of her surrender.

Her lips quiver, with need or fear or sadness, as I move my mouth to the soft pink of her nipple and take it into my mouth.

I don’t need to hold her down now—she’s giving me this. And therein lies the problem: she thinks she’s in control.

I’ll remedy that.

I’ve coaxed her nipple into a hard peak, and the other has followed on its own accord, eager for the same treatment. My hand being free now allows me to reach between us and unfasten my belt. She doesn’t tense, lost in bliss, so damn easy to please.

A glance up at her as my mouth releases her puckered nipple shows me her eyes are closed, and in normal circumstances I’d tell her to open them.

I want her to see who is doing this to her.

I want her to see what she’s making me do.

But her eyes being closed gives me an advantage I’m not ashamed to use.

Soren is patient; I’ll give her that. Or maybe it’s the stubborn streak in her, the need to defy.

She doesn’t try to open her eyes until she feels the leather touch her skin, and by then I’m already cinching her wrists together and notching the belt, using the excess as a leash to yank her arms over her head.

“What are you doing?” She demands, her voice quaking. Now that she’s looking at me, I see tears rimming the lashes on her lower lids. How quickly she went from my needy slut to a frightened little bird.

“Are you scared?” I cock an eyebrow, waiting for a response that I don’t need. Of course she is scared. Her eyes are wild—my little wren trapped in a cage of her own design. The real prison is her fear. That keeps her from actually living, barely fueling basic self-preservation.

“I…” She sets her jaw in determination and shakes her head. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what, Ren? You’ll have to tell me exactly what you don’t want me to do.”

A tear breaks loose, cutting a jagged path down her cheek. “Don’t hurt me.”

Her whisper is barely audible, swallowed in the dark corners of this large room. I tug at the strap in my hand, pulling her with me so that she is yanked to the edge of the bed, a small gasp of pain leaving her lips as her arms are jerked overhead.

“I thought you liked to hurt. Isn’t that why you did this?” I tap her forearm where the pink scars have been fading with time.

The police file that contained the photos of her wounds when they were fresh would have led me to believe they’d take longer than this to heal—they were wicked. Deep, but clean. It’s how I know she didn’t inflict them herself.

“No.”

The word is just a whisper against my lips. If I leaned into her, I could cover her mouth with mine and place a claiming kiss upon her. But right now, it’s not my lips I want on hers.

“I didn’t do this.” She doesn’t sound entirely sure.

“Why should I believe you?”

Soren stares at me a moment, weighing my words, and then laughs.

She’s surprised me to this point, but I see the fire spark in her a second before it ignites.

She goes wild, straining against me, bucking her hips and pulling on the restraints I’ve fashioned in a desperate attempt to get free.

She fights as if she isn’t outmatched by someone twice her size—as if she hasn’t deprived her body of everything it needs to flourish.

She hasn’t thought beyond that glorious idea of escape, of what she’d do if she even made it out of the guest house, let alone off the property.

A beautiful and fragile woman, mostly naked in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language, wouldn’t get far.

Sure, some good Samaritan may find her and take her somewhere safe…

if the people like me don’t get to her first. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that she’s a magnet for people like me… people like her husband.

“Soren,” I sigh, “Calm down. You’re only hurting yourself.”

“ You’re hurting me!” Her voice cracks, almost like she’s suffering betrayal at my actions. I’ve not given her any reason to trust me, so if she’s disappointed now that I’ve finally come out to play, she only has herself to blame.

Patience waning, I snap the belt through the air, knocking her off balance so that she falls flat on the bed again, her breasts heaving with the weight of her panicked breaths.

I wrap it around the bedpost and notch it before she can worm out from under me, and when I tug on it, proving how truly stuck she is, she lets out a dry sob.

Fire and hatred burn in her eyes, melting into an intoxicating medley that exists only for me.

I quit believing in a higher power when I made a deal with the equivalent of the devil, and it did nothing to change the course of my fate.

I quit believing that someone above was watching, listening, or caring about the absolute cesspool that is humanity when I prayed for weeks without ceasing.

I stopped caring if there was a heaven or hell right around the time I realized I sold my soul for nothing.

Since then I’ve never had cause to contemplate divinity.

But in this moment, I feel that she was put into my path.

This broken doll is mine, as sure as the moon belongs to the night.

She’s beautiful just as she is, with all her chaos and anger and fragments of wit.

But for the person willing to piece her back together, she’s a masterpiece of immeasurable value.

I am willing to sift through all the slivers of her, to re-arrange the shattered chasm of her soul.

There’s just one thing in my way.