Page 21 of Hell and Halos

It's not metaphorical, it's very, very physical.

Marcus bends to retrieve the cherry pie and the sight of it, the way he handles it like a man collecting something that belongs to him, turns my stomach in a way that is slow and absolute.

"Wouldn't want to leave our dessert behind, would we?" The chuckle that follows is easy and unhurried, the sound of a man who believes absolutely in the order of his own world, and it lands on me like something cold. Like the flat of a blade pressed to skin just to remind you it's there.

Like he didn't just threaten to rape me thirty seconds ago.

"After you, sugar-plum." He sweeps his free hand toward the elevator with the kind of practiced gallantry that would photograph beautifully, fingers extended, wrist turned just so, the gesture so smooth it almost disguises what it actually is.

A command wearing the costume of courtesy.

There's a panic in me, the likes of which I've never felt before, and it isn't the kind that screams, or claws, or makes a scene.

It's the quiet, surgical kind that doesn't announce itself at all. And I'm not entirely sure where this reaction comes from, because Eleanor was a great many complicated things but violent was never among them.

She never struck me. She never raised her hand, never raised her voice past her personal brand of cold disappointment she had mastered into an art form.

Even an attempt to picture her with a fist raised is so absurd my mind refuses to construct the image—it slides off without so much as a streak left behind.

But the instinct is there. It lives below the place where logic keeps its books, and it doesn't care about my education, or my breeding, or the decade of equestrian composure I have pressed into my spine like a steel rod.

It has one instruction. And the instruction is this—be small.

Be small, and quiet, and weak, and let him believe he has already won.

So I step forward into the elevator, and I do it because the instinct says to, and the instinct is all I have left that I trust right now.

I do it knowin' that I'm not comin' back up the same person who stepped in. That every inch between me and the surface above is another inch between me and Legion, between me and the version of my life that felt, for one crystalline moment, like it might actually be mine.

Not curated for followers.

Not arranged before I was born.

Mine.

And it's bein' taken. Right now. In real time. Inch by slow inch, like something pulled from a wound.

"That's a good girl," Marcus coos, stepping in behind me, and the words land on my skin like something wet that I need to scrape off. "I love when you're obedient, Savannah." He reaches past me to poke the only option on the panel—one button, one direction, no choices left—and it lights up amber. "Modesty suits you. It always has."

The doors close.

The sound of them sealing is very quiet and very final, the way expensive things always are.

"But there's another part of you, isn't there?" he continues, and his voice has shifted into something conversational, something almost gentle, and that gentleness is worse than anything hard would be.

The floor drops out of my stomach as we begin to descend into the granite below the house, into the bedrock, into the dark weight of thirty feet of solid Montana earth closin' over my head like a hand.

"Hmm?" He leans into my neck, nuzzling it with his mouth, and every muscle in my body goes rigid, every tendon pulled taut the way a horse goes still before it kicks. "You like it dirty, don't you?" he whispers, right against my pulse. "You like cock in your throat. Do you have any idea how many times I've watched you, Savannah? How many times I have sat in my office and masturbated to that video that leaked online?" His voice is warm. Appreciative. "All those men watching you. You loved it, didn't you?"

I don't say anything. And he doesn't expect me to, anyway, because there's no version of this conversation where my words matter.

Because we're already here.

The elevator settles into stillness with a sound like a held breath finally released, and the doors open. A motion-sensor light in the corner flicks on, just like it always does when I come down here alone, only nothing about this is like it always is. It's a soft warm glow from an antique brass lamp, and the light it throws is the color of old photographs.

His hand presses flat against the small of my back, steady and deliberate, urgin' me forward.

Every instinct I have is screamin'. Don't. Kick him. Claw his eyes out. Do whatever you have to do to not walk out of this elevator, Savannah. There is a version of me—a feral, unpolished, unafraid version—who would do exactly that. Who would make him bleed before letting this psychopath get me alone in this bunker.