Page 545 of The Bonding Games: Part 1

My voice is perfectly even when I reply, “No, Father.”

“So, you would rather me believe your intelligence is lacking?”

Swallowing, I open my mouth to speak. “I—”

Slap!

My head whips to the side.

“This ends now. There is no reason for you to stay in here. And I now doubt that there ever was.” His hand snaps out again and fixes itself unforgivingly around my jaw, thick fingers digging into my skin. “But since you love it in here so much . . .” His vile gaze slides down my body, and my stomach revolts. “Get on the bed. Clothes off.”

My breathing is loud in the stillness that follows, the woody-black-pepper smell of his scent patch suffocating me.

“Now, Daughter.”

Flicking my eyes up to his face, I glare with a vitriol that would send anyone running.

Anyone but him.

My arm shoots over my shoulder, hand grabbing for one of my armoury sticks.

Blinding pain shoots from my eye and up into my head before I can grasp it, and I scream, falling to the floor, hardly catching myself with one palm while my other presses to my temple as if I could somehow stop the agony from splitting it open.

Father tuts. “Bad, bad girl . . . But you know I like it when you fight.” He shrugs out of his expensive suit jacket lined with the only Avri you will find that is darker than mine. Because he is the ultimate power. He is power. The Game Master. “Now strip. I will not ask you again.” I tamp down on my scream as a new pain replaces the old when he drags me to my feet by my hair.

And then, I strip.

“Good girl.”

Refusing to look at the second naked body in the room, I keep my stare firmly glued to his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, though the disgust is only slightly more mild that what looking any lower would bring me. Every part of me is tense, rigid to keep any damning quivering at bay.

This never gets easier.

When I was twelve, he touched me for the first time in a way I did not like, and I made that clear.

So I received a gift from him that scarred me both internally and externally. A lesson I would never forget that means I will never not know the pain of disobedience.

Then I received even more pain when he drove without mercy through the barrier of my innocence.

“On the bed. Legs spread for me.”

I detest myself when I only take a second to decide to climb up onto the black silk sheets, but the quicker I do this, the quicker it is over.

Laying on my back, I keep my blank stare on the ceiling as I part my thighs, sickening, humiliating tears trying to well in my eyes when I hear his deep noise of approval and the unmistakable sound of him spitting into his hand before flesh works over flesh.

I do not let them come. I must never let them fall.

The bed dips as he climbs on top of me, his face coming into view, forcing me to see him. Only him.

Just as he has always wanted.

The tip of him nudges at my entrance, and my body goes cold and tingly . . . then numb.

His lips press down on mine hard before he says, “Do not forget, Daughter, that I own you. I made you. You would be nothing without me—you are nothing without me.”

Then, he pushes inside.

***