Page 241 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
“Why not?” I asked with a cold laugh. “It’s as good a reason as any? But I can think of a better one. Stay alive becauseyouwant to fuckme.”
She shakes her head, half laughing, half crying. “You’re such a bastard.”
And that’s when I knew it, above anything else. The one thing I should’ve known right from the beginning when I’d very first caught sight of the woman in gold and that mysterious, irrational web of want she’d snared me with.
She wasn’t going to be slashing herself to pieces. I was going to be destroying her, one tiny petal at a time.
“You won’t be slashing yourself anywhere,” I told her and took her throat in my hands. “You’re coming with me tonight. Whether you want to or not.”
“You’re planning on kidnapping me from my city center apartment, sneaking me down past the eons of security staff and right onto the main street outside while the world is watching you? Good luck with that.”
I grinned right back at her. A grin that chilled her right to the bones. “I won’t be kidnapping you. You’ll be joining me very willingly. One last fuck before I let you go.”
That sparked something in her, some final flare of self-respect in that battered little heart of hers. “You’re an asshole. A motherfucker.” The word comes out tumbled from her lips. She isn’t used to insulting people. It’s almost endearing. “A goddamn terrible person.”
I kissed her once. Deeply. Nipping and tugging at her lips with my teeth.
I nipped her lower lip so hard she whimpered, even though she was struggling for air. I tasted her blood in my mouth as I pulled away.
It tasted fucking divine. Her blood. A delicacy I’d been hungry to taste for a long time.
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
I cast her aside and she fell to the floor, gasping for breath as I freed her throat. I strolled over to the table without giving a shit about the medication bottles. What I wanted was right next to them, the scrawled remnants of the letter she was in the midst of writing.
Tristan.
I should’ve known it would be Tristan featuring in her last goodbye.
“You’re good friends, huh?” I ask her.
“Fuck you.”
“He really likes you too, you know,” I told her. “He was prepared to stick his neck well and truly on the line to save you from my grasp the other night. He wouldn’t tell me where you were, not even if it cost him his life.”
“Good thing I was leaving him a letter then.”
I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and her eyes widened in the way I was coming to love too damn much to ignore.
“He’ll be getting a load more than a goodbye letter from you if you don’t join me down at the back of this building in fifteen minutes,” I told her. “If you take your own life up here, I’ll be taking his. If you tell anyone I’ve been here, I’ll be sure to make sure he’s dead within the hour.”
Oh, those pretty eyes of hers. Widening even further. “You can’t.”
But yes. Yes. This was the answer. This had always been the answer. Taking her as mine with no exit and no limits was the prize I’d been chasing right from the start, without even knowing it.
She was mine.
She’d always been mine, from the very moment I’d set my eyes on her, the woman in gold. “I’ll be outside,” I told her. “In the shadows to the right of the parking lot, under the rear awning. You’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“No,” she tried again, but it was weak. I didn’t even look behind me, just made my way out of her suite and back through her domain.
I still had a smile on my face when I took a turn right at the foyer and followed the signs down for the rear parking lot. The security guards were around, and I could sense them, but I didn’t slow down in my paces, just kept my head up high.
And then I waited.
I waited in the shadows for Elaine Constantine with a strangely hypnotic thrill rising up in my veins.
I checked my watch, ticking slowly. I looked up at the building, counting the seconds.
