Page 13 of Sadist (The Triarchy Collection #1)

OCTAVIA

T he walls felt like they were closing in. The day had stretched by in minutes that felt like hours. The slow tick of the clock Theo had left in here taunted me with every passing second.

My mind had fixated on every moment from the morning. Theo. Her body. The sound she had made as she had come on my lap, and then the way she had sauntered naked to the shower and reemerged like nothing had happened.

Completely fucking unbothered.

Meanwhile, I have two new piercings that remind me every time I move of how utterly bothered I had been.

I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes off her. Keep my hands off her. The woman who had held me captive for the better part of a week and tortured my body.

And had enjoyed doing it.

Not just enjoyed?—

A wave of arousal ran through me at the memory of how wet she had become as she had inflicted her torture.

The glint in her eyes as she had smirked down at me.

The surprise she hadn’t been able to mask as my body had reacted the way it always did.

Need had overtaken logical thinking, and I had descended into hell to burn with my personal devil.

But the day had stretched by. Noon, then the normal time we had dinner…then the night began to pass as I watched the clock and paced.

By midnight, I was definitely slipping into insanity, my head whirling with so many thoughts and memories that it was starting to blur into one overwhelming noise that my father’s voice echoed from too often. My skin was clammy as I rubbed my arms, feeling feverish, even though I knew I wasn’t.

Pinching the inside of my arm, I focused on the pain rather than the noise in my head, sat on my narrow bed cross-legged, and closed my eyes.

Fuck Theo . Fuck her for sending my mind into a full crisis and then skipping off after she was done with me. Fuck her for leaving me in here to fester in self-loathing. He was right. I was worthless. I didn’t even have the self-respect to say no to the woman who abducted me and mean it.

I pinched harder as his voice echoed in the dark spaces of my mind.

“You are just a whore, Baby Girl. That’s all you are good for. Girls like you are nothing special.”

I jumped up, breathing heavily, and paced again, going to the door for the hundredth time that day and trying the handle. It didn’t move. Just like every other time. A small sound of distress slipped from me as I leaned my brow against the cold metal of the door and breathed deeply.

“Theo,” I whispered, hating how broken my voice sounded. “Please let me out of here.”

There was a loud beep, the bolt drawing back inside the door, and I slumped in relief, ripping the door open and bolting out of the room in the same heartbeat. It was three a.m.—what the fuck was she playing at?”

I ground to a halt in the hallway that led to the main living area.

It was three a.m.

There was only one reason she would be letting me out now, and the thought made rage ignite in my chest.

“Oh, get fucked,” I said out loud, storming toward the door. “If you think you can treat me like your own personal call girl, you are in for a world of trouble, Theodora!”

I burst through the door, seeing her leaning against the table.

“I am not a whore,” I snapped, pointing an accusing finger at her.

“And I am not going to f—” I cut off as I got a good look at her.

There was blood everywhere. She had blood-soaked bandages in a dozen places on her body, and she was pressing her equally blood-soaked and balled up T-shirt against her thigh, the jeans on one side dark with even more of it.

She raised a brow at me, sitting heavily on the seat.

“Noted,” she said, her eyes slightly unfocused. “Now, can you do me a favor and get me the med kit in the kitchen, Sweets? It’s in the top cupboard above the coffee machine.”

“What happened?” I gasped. The longer I looked, the more wounds I saw, and there was a worrying amount of blood soaking her jeans.

“Workplace disagreement,” she murmured, her words slightly slurred and her head hanging low. “Octavia, the kit.”

She swayed where she sat, and I only just grabbed her in time as she fainted, grunting as I took her weight in my arms, her legs still tangled in the bench seat.

“Jesus, you are heavier than you look,” I gasped, lowering her slowly to the floor.

Leaving her legs propped up on the seat, I felt for her pulse.

It was faster than it should be, and I turned my attention to the mess of her leg.

The denim was sticky with blood and stuck to her skin, and I ran to the kitchen, finding the kit and dragging it out of the cupboard with a grunt.

Flipping open the med kit, I rummaged through it, pulling out bottles of saline and disinfectant.

Theo didn’t even wake as I undid her jeans and yanked them down her hips.

Pulling on some gloves, I doused her entire thigh in saline and antiseptic and cleaned the blood away as best I could with the wipes I found.

I swallowed hard at the thin wound in her upper thigh.

The bleeding seemed to have slowed, which made me breathe a little easier.

Surely if it had hit something major, it would still be bleeding heavily?

Though…I couldn’t see anything else that would have made her pass out like she had.

Sitting back on my heels for a moment, I ran through every scrap of knowledge I had picked up from my many late nights of binge-watching medical documentaries, while eyeing the contents of the med kit.

As I flushed the thigh wound out it started bleeding again, though only sluggishly, so I pressed gauze hard against it and wrapped her leg tightly, and was pleased to see it didn’t bleed through.

Theo groaned softly, her eyes fluttering and breath catching as she tried to push herself to the side. I helped her just in time for her to start retching, but she brought nothing up.

“Steady,” I murmured, pushing the hair back from her clammy forehead. “Just lie back for a moment.” She looked at me, but it was clear she wasn’t seeing me as she nodded, flopping back against the floor with a hand over her face.

“Theo.” I snapped my fingers in front of her, but got no reaction, and frowned in concern.

Gathering up the blood-streaked packets and putting the med kit back together, I returned it to its usual spot and turned to see she had come to, leaning her weight on her elbow and looking dazedly around.

I went to her, gently lifting her legs off the bench and helping her sit up.

“I’m fine,” she mumbled, trying to push my hands away.

“Oh, yes. I can see that,” I scolded, sighing in exasperation as she made to get to her feet and swayed.

“Here.” I helped her up, slinging one of her arms over my shoulders as I guided her to the bedroom, her steps slow and listless.

“Are you drunk?” I asked. “Or just really bad with blood?”

“Concussed. Twice…I’m an overachiever. Blown up…and stabbed,” she muttered.

“Oh.” I glanced sideways at her. She looked like she had come straight from the frontlines of active war, a thin layer of dust coating her skin and peppered with blood and grazes.

Her legs buckled, and I tightened my arm around her waist.

“Just get to the bed and you can lie down,” I urged.

She barely seemed to register I was there, letting me lead her before collapsing onto her bed.

“Let me get this off you, it’s filthy,” I said, tugging at her shirt.

Theo tried to lie down, and I gripped her shirt.

“Theodora. Arms up or I will cut it off,” I demanded, waiting for her to groggily lift her arms so I could slip the ruined shirt off, surprised at how she didn’t hesitate to follow the direct order.

Oh Jesus.

She was covered in wounds. Bruises were blooming across her ribs in deep purples and blues, overlapping old ones that had faded to faint yellows. She had a dozen or more scars, both old and new, peeking out from beneath tattoos and marring others, each one telling a story I wanted to know.

“Lie down,” I said, and she did without question, her eyes already closed. Concern flooded me. I knew enough about concussions to know you weren’t meant to let them sleep. But what was I going to do…call an ambulance? On what? To where?

“Oh hey, can you send an ambulance to an unnamed concrete prison where I’m being held captive? My abductor bumped her head.”

I snorted at the thought, and Theo’s eyes fluttered.

“It’s not funny.”

“No,” I agreed. “Some would say you are in quite the predicament.”

That earned me a frown, barely a crease between her brows as she fought to open her eyes and failed, slipping back into unconsciousness. I watched her for a moment, reassuring myself that the rise and fall of her chest was steady, before walking back into the living area to get her water.

And then it hit me.

Why did I care?

The woman who had ripped me from my life and was actively holding me to extort my father was incapacitated.

Unconscious and unable to defend herself.

I, on the other hand, was out of my cell with full access to the weapons I knew were in here.

Yet that hadn’t been my first thought. I had seen her hurt, and I had jumped in to help her.

The glass I was filling spilled over as I stared at the flow of water, my eyes sliding to the door and its softly glowing keypad. It was shut…but still…

Crossing to it, I tried the handle. Locked. I recognized the keypad as one that needed an eight-digit code—I would be here until I went grey trying to figure it out. But…there were knives in the kitchen. And there was no way she could fight me off.

No.

My skin crawled, and I flung that thought from my mind as fast as it had entered it, my gaze falling on the monitors on the far side of the room. I was on them in a flash, firing up the screens and glancing behind me with a wince as they beeped and hummed to life.

It took me less than a minute to get past the Vanguard security screening, opening multiple pages and bypassing the VPN to bring up our location on one screen, before displaying the prominent news channels on another.

I froze, my fingers hovering over the keys as I stared at the screen.

The words “ Vanguard heir murdered in extortion attempt” flashed across the screen with an old photo of me.

“William Vanguard asks for privacy to mourn his late daughter,” another read.

“What the fuck?” I breathed, clicking to another screen that showed an aerial view of a collapsed bridge, multiple cars crushed and smoking below as flames licked their way through a couple of burned-out vehicles.

Every channel I clicked through was reporting various renditions of the same account.

According to the world…I was dead. Killed in the collapse of the bridge after an unexplained explosion took the lives of twelve civilians.

Was Theo there? Is that where she was injured? I went cold. Was she the one who set off the bombs? Twelve civilians had been killed…Their faces started coming up on screen. Mothers…Fathers. Two were barely out of their teens.

“No.” I shook my head slowly, my hand to my mouth as I clicked through news articles.

No…She didn’t do this. The logical part of my brain took over, calming the panic that had been steadily rising.

No. My death is the opposite of what Theo needed to secure whatever negotiation was happening with Vanguard Technology.

I was the bargaining chip in this situation—faking my death would undermine their efforts.

The more I looked, the more questions I had as reports were released that a burned corpse had been identified as Octavia Marie Vanguard by the coroner.

“Holy Mother of God,” I breathed, sitting back in the chair and clasping my hands behind my neck.

For all intents and purposes. I was now a ghost.