Gypsy Brothers: The Complete Series (36 page)

FIFTEEN

I blink, shaking my head, and hear movement upstairs.

Dornan.

I adjust my white sundress and make my way quietly up the stairs. As I hit the last stair, I hear the creak of a chair from the office. I knock gently on the door and it swings open.

Showtime. I’m woefully prepared for this, but I suck in a breath and give it my all. I haven’t come this far just to drop my game in the final stretch.

Dornan’s sitting behind his desk, his laptop open in front of him. He’s staring intently at it, but presses a button shifting his focus to me when I enter the room.

“Sammi,” he breathes.

“Are you okay?” I ask hesitantly, hovering on the other side of his desk. I’m stalling. After making love to Jase, I can’t bear the thought of Dornan’s touch on my skin.

He rises from his chair, his ability to walk around apparently undisturbed. I marvel at the fact.

“You can walk,” I say, surprised. “I can’t believe it. After what happened?”

Luckiest bastard alive. That blast should have killed him.

“Come here, you little cunt,” he says, his teeth gritted together in a grotesque sort of grimace. It’s made worse by the healing scars that litter every piece of his exposed flesh.

“Whoa,” I reply lightly, surprised. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Dornan smiles, baring his teeth, and my world crashes down around me as I hear the door slam behind me, locked with a key from the outside.

He turns his laptop around so that I can see the video he’s watching, and my heart sinks as my knees threaten to buckle underneath me.

As I realize what it is I’m seeing.

Surveillance footage of a girl. A girl in a garage, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, her movements quick and efficient as she places crudely fashioned bombs into the gas tanks of her enemy’s motorcycles. My heart rushes up into my mouth as I continue to watch the screen, completely engrossed. As the girl turns, the camera catches her face in the infrared light, and I see her trepidation.

Her excitement.

What a stupid girl.

I take a step back, hitting the door with my ass as he answers my question.

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

“No,” he says, coming around the desk at me, “but I kissed
your
mother with it plenty of times.” He smirks as he delivers the final word in his sentence.

“Juliette.”

SIXTEEN

Every day for six years, I used to pray that I would find my way back to the boy I loved.

Until finally, one day,
I did
.

But that’s the funny thing about life. Nothing good ever lasts, not for me, anyway. You think you’re the one with the power, at least I did, but then I got careless. One tiny mistake, and now I am powerless to stop what comes next.

People think money equals power, but all the money in my bank account, the dirty notes laundered clean that my father left for me, are useless.

Money does not equal power. Power is held by the one with the knife in his hand, tracing shallow cuts into your skin.

Power is held by the one who owns you.

I had power once.

Now, I have nothing.

"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."

- Khalil Gibran

PROLOGUE

I loved Jason Ross for seven years. One together, then six spent apart, while I festered in my rage and he grieved my  supposed death.

Then finally, we were reunited again.

He knew me as a stranger before he finally saw me for who I really am.

Juliette Portland.

A dead girl. A lover. A murderer.

My heart was finally whole again.

But none of it matters anymore.

Because now, it’s all been torn away.

I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.

Before Dornan breaks me.

ONE

“
Shallow cuts
.”

I whimper again, struggling against my ropes as darkness threatens to pull me under.

And I want it to pull me under. Mercy. Blackness.
Please, just let me pass out.

He stops, his black eyes gleaming with satisfaction as he surveys his handiwork. My head sags forward, my chin hitting my chest, and I can see the scores of small cuts he’s marked into the skin on my stomach. So far, he’s avoided my tattoo, and the scars that hover below it, but he keeps touching it, caressing me there, and I know he’s planning something painful for that spot.

I’m tied to a chair today, my wrists bound behind me. My ankles are completely numb, tied tightly against the chair legs. Some days he ties me to the bed, each limb stretched painfully and attached securely to the corners of the bare frame. There’s no mattress, and the bedsprings bite at my back as he takes his pleasure making me bleed. I’m still wearing the same thing I had on when he snatched me - a black T-shirt, sliced open down the front so that it hangs loosely at my sides and black cotton bra and panties. He’s taken my jeans from me, probably so I feel the bitter cold at night.

Or to have easy access to my legs so he can drag his knife along every inch of exposed flesh.

He still hasn’t raped me. Hasn’t even touched me down there. It confuses me, and it makes me afraid. I want him to get it over and done with. Do what he’s going to do, instead of leaving me for days at a time, starving and cold, as my blood dries on my skin, coating the tops of my thighs.

“Shallow, shallow cuts,” he murmurs, his low voice rocky and rough. I moan as he drags the blade through my skin again, breaking it open like paper and pressing his fingers into the wound he’s created. He leans forward and I whimper again, knowing what he’s about to do.

I jolt back suddenly as his tongue scrapes along my opened skin like sandpaper, claiming the blood that he’s spilled, drinking in my sorrow. His breath is hot against my cold skin, his tongue like a dirty worm burrowing inside of me.

Agony.

I’ve been down here for so long, I’ve lost track of time. There’s no sunlight in here, only concrete, dampness, and cold. At night I freeze, and during the day I swelter. That is the only way I know if it’s night or day, and even these things are starting to become muddled. I count my days by the fresh wounds, having nothing else to reference time with.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. I could have been down here for a day or a year, and the fact remains the same:

I am never getting out.

I know this now. I fought against him for the first few days, until he broke me. Starved me and beat me and broke my spirit. It’s shameful, really.

I always thought I was stronger than this.

Assumed that he’d never be able to break me - but he did. So quickly.

“I’ve got a surprise for you today,” he says, his mouth quirked into a dark smile, a smile that feeds off my suffering. A smile marked with my blood, his full lips coated in a red sheen.

Surprises are bad. I don’t like his surprises. They always hurt me, make me bleed. I don’t even know if I’ve got any blood left to bleed for him.

I cry softly as I remember the last words he spoke to me in his office before he pressed the rag to my face, and held it there until the noxious fumes in the material stole my consciousness.

“I know you think this is going to be bad,” he had said, his grip against my face almost enough to break my jaw, “but however bad you think this is going to be? It’s going to be so. Much. Worse.”

TWO

The door to my room - to my dungeon - slams shut loudly, and I jerk awake from the sleep I’d finally been able to succumb to.

It feels like I’ve only been asleep for a moment at the most, and when I see my blood still wet on his bottom lip, my suspicions are confirmed.

Damn. I was really enjoying that brief interlude of calm unconsciousness.

He’s not holding the knife anymore. Instead, he’s got a small vial of something in one hand, and a slim plastic package in the other. He places both on the small wooden table that sits just inside the room and stalks over to me.

I gasp as he undoes my ropes. Blood rushes to my ankles, which creates incredible pain, too. I cry out as he fists a hand in my hair and drags me from the chair, throwing me onto the narrow single bed face down. Wire springs grab at my wounded skin, tearing at me, and I force myself to lie still, my face pressed into biting metal, and my eyes staring a the bloodstained floor beneath it. I don’t even fight as ropes are wrapped around my ankles and wrists, flaying my aching limbs in four directions, making me completely vulnerable to his whims.

“Look at me.”

I turn my head to the side and see him sitting on the chair I’ve been tied to for the last several hours. He rips the plastic package open with his teeth, and I feel my eyes grow wider when I see it’s a hypodermic needle. I swallow thickly as he stabs the tip of it into the small glass vial he’s holding, and draws liquid into it.

“What’s that?” I ask, stunned and scared.

He tuts. “It won’t kill you, if that’s what you’re wondering.” He scoots closer, brings the sharp metal tip down to my arm.

It’s automatic, my struggle. I cry out at him as I fight my restraints, as I press my knees into the bed and try desperately to get up onto them.

“Stop.” One hand on my back, pressing me down, but I ignore him. He chuckles. “I didn’t think you had any fight left in you, Julie. I was getting disappointed there.”

I continue to struggle, even though I know it’s futile. In the position I’m in, legs wide and ankles tied painfully tight to the bed corners, I’ve got no leverage. Face down, with my arms painfully twisted into ropes behind my back, I can’t get away. All I’m doing is wasting my precious energy.

“I said,
stop
.” He’s less amused this time, trying to stop me as I thrash around, drawing away from the tip of the needle. I can only hope that he needs to hit my vein, and can’t just shove the stuff into my arm.

His smile disappears and he recaps the syringe, shoving it in his jeans pocket. He twists me painfully so I’m on my side and covers my mouth with his large hand. I kick and scream, but he easily holds me in place. I panic as he reaches down with his other hand and pinches my nose shut with his thumb and forefinger.

I gasp against his palm, desperately trying to suck air in, but I get nothing. Before I know it, blurry grey dots are in front of me, and then the world goes black.

***

Black and light. Unconscious and awake.

I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep normally.

Was it beside Jase the night before we fought? The night before I went and fucked everything up?

We should have just run away.

But I couldn’t. The vengeful fire that burns within me hasn’t abated - it’s just been temporarily smothered by my torment and despair. My plan to wreak revenge, interrupted by Dornan’s sick fascination with my blood and screams.

My most primal desires, my basest emotions, are still tied to my desire to see Dornan suffer and die. In the long hours as my legs cramp and my arms go numb, I fantasize about the different ways it could happen.

Maybe he’ll put the knife down. Maybe I could pretend I was still unconscious and take him by surprise. Hide behind the door and storm him as he enters, dig my fingernails into his eyeballs until they burst. Oh, the pathetic fantasies that swim in my mind.

But I can’t get away. I’m always tied to either the bed or the chair – or—more humiliatingly—held by a wrist as I pee in a bucket in the corner. Thank fuck he takes me to the toilet once a day. But even in there, I’m chained to the wall and given exactly ten minutes to get done before he comes back in to get me. So there’s no escaping from there, either.

He’s smart. He knows that no matter how much he hurts me, I’ll always try to run away at the first opportunity. There’s no Stockholm shit going on here. I hate him and he hates me and only one of us is leaving this fight alive.

So until I find some kind of way to outsmart him, to overpower him, to
just fucking get past him
, I’m screwed. I’m as good as dead.

When I come to I’m still tied to the bed, face down in a pile of bedsprings. A sharp pain in my arm lets me know the needle has found its vein. I moan as liquid burns a fire inside me, spreading from my elbow to my shoulder and then enveloping my entire body. It hurts like nothing else I’ve ever had injected into my body, and I panic as I wonder if he’s decided to just be done with me and kill me already.

He must see the panic in my eyes, because he laughs.

“Don’t worry,” he practically sings. “It’s not poison. At least, not the kind you think it is.”

My limbs feel heavy and my brain feels like it’s been stuffed with tissue paper. It’s all scrunchy and vague inside, and I can’t quite see from one thought to another, each synapse shrouded from the next.

“I thought you were going to kill me,” I say, confused. Why am I talking? I curse myself for engaging with him and bite down on my lip to try and wake myself up a little.

“Are you afraid?” Dornan asks.

“Yes,” I answer without hesitation.

And that’s when it dawns on me. He’s given me something that makes it almost impossible for me to resist his questions. A sedative. A truth serum of some kind.

The name of it swims somewhere in my brain, the brain that no longer has a filter.

“You’re a fucking coward,” I say, noticing that my words are slightly slurred. “You should be the one strapped down like a fucking animal.”

He grins. “Maybe. But look who’s top dog today?”

He traces a line down my arm, and though I can barely feel it, the casual affection he feigns makes me quiver noticeably.

“Do you like it when I touch you like that?” he asks quietly, his gravel voice rattling my chest.

I blink slowly, groggily. “It confuses me,” I answer. I’ve never felt more vulnerable in my life. Well, maybe once. But right here, stripped of every ability to resist his questions, I feel dumb and drugged and completely fucking at his mercy.

And so very, very alone.

I glance up at him and I can see how much he’s enjoying this - this absolute position of power and domination. Not even my mind is safe from him now. All of my secrets, the ones buried deep, are his for the taking.

Elliot. Jase. Grandma.
Kayla
. Oh, Jesus. Nobody is safe right now. Please,
fucking please
don’t ask me about them.

He seems to read my thoughts, or perhaps he’s just reading the panic washing over my face in crushing waves that threaten to drown me.

“Tell me,” he says conversationally. “Did you
like
it when I fucked you, Juliette? I’m not talking about six years ago. I’m talking about in the clubhouse just weeks ago.” He trails his hand down to my ass, covered only with a pair of black panties. He slides his hand under the thin material and grabs a handful of ass, squeezing tightly.

“When you gave me your body to use exactly as I pleased? When I licked you here?” he slides his hand out of the material and reaches through my legs, pressing against my sensitive nub.

“Yes,” I reply blankly, staring off into the distance. I can’t lie. My brain won’t let me. But I can tell the truth.

Memories of our horrifying tryst come back to me like a tidal wave. His mouth on my most sensitive of places. The way he filled me, every last part of me smothered by his larger-than-life presence, until I was drowning in his darkness.

“Ask me what my favorite time was,” I say quietly. He seems taken aback.

“You’re going to kill me anyway,” I shrug as much as my restraints allow, which isn’t much, but he gets the idea. “Don’t you want to know how I liked you best?”

My voice is shaking, but I speak quickly. I want to get it out before he punches me or strangles me unconscious.

He laughs throatily, regaining his self-control. “Of course,” he says. “Tell me all about it, baby girl.”

I smile to myself as the words begin to form through my drugged haze. “I loved it when you held me against the wall and fucked me until I saw stars,” I say in a calm, measured voice. “I loved the way you made me come alive as you choked the life out of me. Because I’d just licked the tears from your face, and I could taste your grief on my tongue while you squeezed my sorrow away.”

My lips quiver into a smile as he roars loudly.
Fucker
. I’ve still got it, even drugged, bound and half-naked. I’ve still got that fire burning inside me that just wants to completely fucking obliterate Dornan Ross and everything he’s ever touched.

He snatches the knife up and for a moment I think he’s going to completely lose his shit and stab me to death, but instead he flips me over. I moan as the bed springs grab at me, trying to keep me face down. After he’s finished I’m laying on my side, my blank hip pressed into the bed and my tattooed, scarred hip sticking up toward the ceiling.

“I don’t like that you covered my marks, Julie.” He brings the blade down and now I know what he’s got in store. I feel my eyes widen as I take a sharp breath, and then the searing, ripping pain begins.

“No matter,” he spits, cutting into my skin. “I’ll just put them back.”

The only thing that relieves the pain in any tiny way is making a lot of noise. It gives the pain somewhere to go - a voice in the world. It acknowledges what’s happening to each screaming nerve ending that’s being ripped apart.

So that’s what I do. I open my mouth, and I scream, and I don’t stop screaming until he’s finished cutting any trace of Elliot’s beautiful work from my flesh.