Page 10 of Love Corrupted
“Was that your way of throwing a tantrum?” he asked, sounding bored. I turned my head to glare at him and saw he was leaning against the wall, watching me with unabashed amusement as I desperately tried to figure out how to open the doors.
“Katie, you’re a smart girl. You know you aren’t getting past those doors unless I want you to,” he pointed out.
“Andwhydon’t you want me to, Mason?” I spun around to face him.
“Tell me.” He pushed off the wall and took a step forward. “Do you want to save your sister because it’s ‘the right thing to do’? Or do you want to save your sister because you’re trying to prove something to yourself?”
“Prove something like…?”
“You want to prove you aren’t like me. That we don’t breathe the same, bleed the same, or desire the same things.”
I wasn’t anything like him.
Liar.
“Mason, what if I just want to get my sister and go home to my mom?”
Nothing but silence answered that question. He cocked his head and studied me, his expression unreadable.
“Are you saying you want to leave me?” He lost all traces of cockiness, his tone softened.
No. You could never leave him.
I didn’t say that aloud. I didn’t say anything. A look flashed across his face but he masked it before I could analyze what I just saw. Was it hurt? Was it evenpossiblefor me to hurt him?
Of course it is, you stupid girl.
He cleared his throat and brushed past me, going straight to the doors. He then proceeded to tap four numbers into a keypad attached to the far wall. I had to have looked at the thing a dozen times without bothering to actually see what it was.
“There are over twenty rooms in this house. This hall specifically has twelve,” he explained, pushing the doors open and gesturing for me to follow. “I want you to give me a week to convince you to stay. Within that week, you’re going to pick seven doors. Each door has something different behind it. Your sister is behind one of them. If you find her before the seven days are up, I’ll take you to your mother myself. However.” He paused and turned back around with a cruel grin in place. “If you give up before then, or happen to fail, she isn’t going anywhere.”
My brows slammed together in confusion.
“I don’t understand. I saw the picture—she’s your wife. Why are you keeping her locked away?”
“It was an illusion, Katie,” he sighed, as if he’d already explained this to me in detail.
“The only woman who will be granted the honor of having my last name is you, if you’ll have me. No one else comes close to deserving it.”
How did I deserve it? I quickly reran our conversation in my head, coming back to his earlier statement.
“Did you say something aboutsavingmy sister?”
His megawatt grin was the only answer I needed. What had he done with her?
Nothing she doesn’t deserve. Why are you so worried about her? She left you.
Shaking my head as if to clear the negative thoughts away, I went to the first door to my immediate left and tried to open it, but the damn thing was locked tight. The door directly across from it was the same.
His dark chuckle from behind me had every hair follicle on my body rising to attention.
“Did you plan this?” I looked back and asked him.
“I might have had something to do with it,” he teased.
“Is this a game to you?”
“Maybe—although I’d rather call it a proposition,” he replied flippantly.
