Page 81 of His Kidnapped Queen
I cup her face in my hands, pull her physically up my body to kiss her, tasting myself on her tongue.
“Do you feel better, baby?” I ask her quietly as she nuzzles into my neck.
“A little,” she admits, frowning slightly. I chuckle. She’s cute; I can’t deny that.
And I can’t deny how I feel about her anymore. I don’t know what love is, not really. I don’t even know if my parents were in love. I think my father was, but my mother? I’m not so sure.
I think she was less in love and more swept away by the lifestyle, impregnated, forced to stay because otherwise she’d lose me and Nico. So I don’t have the best role models when it comes to romantic love.
But I think—no, I know—that I’m in love with Sophia.
It doesn’t make any sense. I barely know her, other than what I was able to scare up when she first left, which was just her policework. I know she’s a hard worker, wanted to go up in the ranks. Her career just kind of fell off a few years ago, though, and it does hold up her story about losing her partner.
But I still don’t believe her. You can apparently love someone you don’t trust, and that’s throwing me for a loop.
“Do you trust me now?” she asks with her mouth parted.
“No,” I whisper, but her face doesn’t fall. She’s not surprised. “Do you trust me, pixie?”
“Never,” she answers.
And well, that’s the long and short of it, isn’t it? No matter how I feel about her or how she feels about me, we don’t trust each other.
And nothing can come from a relationship with no trust.
23
SOPHIA
I dream that I’m running and running and I can’t get anywhere. It’s not like there’s glue all around me, as in dreams previous, but more that I’m running in slow motion. I keep passing by the same spiral staircase, over and over.
My father is there. He stands at the end of the spiral staircase, pleading with me. His expression is pained, tear tracks down his face. The last time I’d seen my father cry was the day my mother died.
“She’s gone,” he’s telling me in my dream, over and over.
Three days before my eleventh birthday.
I hear the sirens even though I know they can’t possibly be real. My father had told emergency services she was already gone. I look around, trying to find out where the sirens are coming from, and when I look back at the staircase it’s not my father, but Luca standing there, that same pained expression on his face.
He puts his hand to his side. It comes away bloody and I start to scream.
The scream dies in my throat as I wake, Luca’s arms already around me.
“Shh, shh, pixie, it’s all right,” he’s soothing me.
“I had a bad dream,” I say dumbly.
“I know. You stated crying in your sleep.”
My hand flies to my face, wiping tears away from my cheeks.
“What did you dream about?"
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
The dream seems pretty straightforward now that I’m not in it anymore. I’m afraid of Scott sending the cops, taking Luca down. I don’t want to lose him, even though he kidnapped me. Even though he hates me.
Even though I should hate him, too.
