She’d been avoiding him for more than a week, since their arrival back from Brazil. She had murmured that she’d needed space and even lied to him, telling him she’d had a vicious headache. When he’d questioned her, she’d assured him it wasn’t a full-blown migraine, but that it was bad enough for her to require her own room so she couldn’t be disturbed. He had been annoyed and flat out refused, but her arguments had won him over. What if he disturbed her in her sleep, jostled her head? She had assured him it would only be temporary. But she knew he was losing patience. And, apparently, it was now gone.
Casey wanted to feel bad for lying. For being disloyal to the man that was tirelessly searching for her family’s killers so he could present their heads on a platter to his chosen queen. But she couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty for misleading the person who had known all along and never said a word. It should have been him to tell her about her family. About the hole in her head; the damage to her brain. In her heart, she felt like he’d built her up only to cut her adrift when she needed him most.
He seized her from behind and flung her around to face him. She was wearing heels so she was face to face with him when she turned. Perhaps she’d sensed this confrontation coming. Knew that he’d had enough of her illusiveness.
“I told you to come to me,” he snarled, his dark eyes livid with warning. “You do as I tell you, every time I tell you, when I tell you to do it, Casey.”
Casey knew she was skating the dangerous edge of his patience, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She tugged her arm, trying to pull it from his grip. His fingers dug into her flesh, refusing to give up his hold. She pressed her lips together and said, “I’m not your dog, Reyes. I don’t have to come when I’m called.”
His nostrils flared in reaction and she winced at the brutal tightening of his hand. There would definitely be bruises later. “And this is how you want to play it with me, nena?” he asked, his voice surprisingly quiet considering the waves of anger pouring from his body. “After I have allowed you a week of space. Allowed you to lie to me, to go to another room and withhold your body from me? I have given you all the tenderness and understanding a man in my position is capable of.” He stared hard at her, allowing his heated gaze to linger on her lips before moving back to her eyes so she could see the determination there. Her grace period was definitely over. “You want to be very careful in your next words, mi amor.”
Her eyes traced over the scars on his face; the scars that declared him king. The deep, pitted lines that marked his battles and made him the hardened leader that he was. He was tough and commanding, everything that she was not and never could be. She didn’t understand why he wanted her. She was nothing to a man like him. She should have died on that floor with the rest of her family. She was a fake survivor. A ghost living in the shell of a broken woman. She was a false queen.
She turned her head to look away from him toward the mountains across from their hidden valley. Their home was really spectacularly beautiful and if she was being honest with herself, truly honest, if she could have chosen to live anywhere in the world, despite having been essentially brought here against her will, she would have chosen this place anyway. It was breathtaking.
“Just go away and leave me alone, Reyes,” she murmured absently, her eyes taking on an unfocused faraway look as she continued to gaze into the distance.
She felt the heat of his rising anger wash over her as he clasped his hand over her other arm and shook her until her head snapped up. “Look at me, damn you,” he gritted from between clenched teeth. When she finally did, forcing herself to focus on his blazingly angry, dark face, he spoke again, his voice throbbing with quiet authority. “Last chance, Casey. It’s time for you to stop drifting and come back to me now. Let’s do this the easy way, cariña.”
She studied him for a moment, tempted to give in. Tempted to recapture the weeks before she remembered what happened to her family, before she found out what had happened to her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t trust him. And worse, she couldn’t trust herself. She wasn’t brave, she wasn’t strong, she was just… numb to everything. She was the pale imitation of a woman who should’ve died ten years ago.
“Fuck you, Reyes!” she spat, smacking his chest with her open palm. “You don’t get a say in what I do. You withheld the truth from me. You broke me just as much as Ignacio ever did, maybe worse. If this is how I choose to deal, then you get no say in the matter.”
A part of her knew she was being too hard on him, that he’d had her best interests at heart. That he could have kept the truth from her indefinitely if he’d chosen. But she was so damn angry and in so much pain over the fresh feelings of loss that she couldn’t seem to control herself and Reyes was the only one she could strike out at. So rather than heed the inner voice telling her to step carefully with the vicious mob boss, she struck out at him.
“You dare to say his name to me?” Reyes growled dangerously, “You dare to compare me to that weak-willed excuse for a man?” His voice rose in a snarl as he said, “His name does not pass your lips again, understand?”
“What are you going to do about it?” she charged back at him.
“I’m going to wake you the fuck up,” he snarled and turned, hauling her with him, heading toward the house.
Casey thought he meant to drag her inside the house and up to their bedroom, but he didn’t. Instead he skirted the house and strode toward a side of the compound she had never been to before. She could barely keep up to him in her high heels and with his long, agitated strides. She had to run and was sadly out of breath when they arrived at a nondescript concrete building. It’s very blandness was utterly terrifying.
“Wh-where are we?” she asked hesitantly, clutching at a stitch in her side and trying to hide her panic.
He ignored her question, instead nodding sharply at a guard stationed by the door. The guard opened the door for them and stood aside to let them pass. Reyes readjusted his grip on her elbow when she tried digging her heels in and dragged her through the doorway and into a dimly lit hallway that screamed ‘once you enter this passageway, you will never exit.’ Casey walk-stumbled after Reyes as he pulled her impatiently down one long corridor after another.
“I-is this some kind of prison?” Casey asked timidly.
“Yes.” His answer was immediate and clipped, not inviting further commentary, but the sheer size of the building prompted her to speak up.
“How many people do you keep in here?” she asked incredulously.
He didn’t answer, instead, stopping so abruptly that she nearly ran into his back. He punched a code into the panel next to a thick, metal door, pushing it open when a little light flashed. He dragged her through the door and gave her a shove into a small, airless room; finally releasing her. Casey rubbed her arm and looked around her in utter dismay, terror swirling around the pit of her stomach and crawling up her throat. She was in some kind of prison cell. The door slammed shut, echoing ominously in the horrible room. She swung around, her arms wrapped protectively around herself.
Reyes stood facing her, locked in with her. She shivered, apprehension crawling up and down her spine. She almost wished he’d locked her in and left. Nothing good could come of the dead-eyed look he was giving her. She was positive it was the same look he gave the people he tortured horribly for whatever information he needed from them right before he sent them to a grisly, bloody death. The same look he’d given Ignacio.
“Please…” she whispered, backing away from him.
“You had your chance, nena. I believe you told me to fuck off, that I had no say in how you dealt with your grief,” he told her coldly, stalking toward her. He tugged at the hem of his shirt and then pulled it over his head. She watched in horrified fascination as he revealed his beautiful tanned torso, littered with scars. He let his shirt drop to the floor and snaked an arm out for her. Casey threw her hand up to block him, but he grabbed her wrist and dragged her toward him, pulling her against hi
s chest and snarling in her face, icy disdain giving way to heated rage.
“And I’m telling you,” he growled into her face. “Every fucking thing about you is my business. Your happiness, your sadness, your grief, your very life. Your everything. You’re about to learn how much you belong to me, Casey.”
She whimpered, terror streaking through her veins with each word. She began fighting him as he started removing her clothes with ruthless efficiency, ignoring her cries of fright. He stripped off each article of clothing until she stood naked and shivering in front of him. She wasn’t shaking from cold, but from the humiliation of being dragged from the yard into a prison and stripped bare. She was shaking from fear of the unknown and from fear of the look in his eyes. Reyes was looking at her without pity and without mercy. She knew her pleas would fall on deaf ears. He was going to do whatever he’d planned on doing. She’d had her chance to give him what he wanted and she threw it in his face without grace or the gratefulness a man in his position expected. Now she would pay.
Casey frantically searched the space around her, looking for anything that might help her. A way out, a way to fight him off… anything. Then her panicked eyes landed on something that nearly sent her spiraling into the dark places in her head. Chains. He had chains in his dungeon. Because now there was nothing else she could call this place he’d dragged her into. Her frantic search also yielded a long steel bench and a floor drain. Oh god. This was some catastrophic shit.
Was he finally done with her? Was this it? Had he brought her to this awful place to kill her?
Without any sort of preliminaries, Reyes flung her around so she was facing away from him and dragged her toward the metal bench. Casey fought him with everything she had, but her strength was absolutely nothing compared his, nothing! He looped an arm across her slim waist and lifted her off the floor.
“No, no, no!” she screamed, kicking her feet into the air and trying to pry his arm from her, expecting at any moment to feel the cold caress of a blade at her throat.
The most terrifying part was his lack of words. He said nothing to her as she screamed and cursed at him and then calmed enough to beg him to stop whatever he was doing. He simply held her off the floor, pinned against the warmth of his hard chest and waited her out until she tired and lay whimpering against him. Then he shoved her abruptly forward, facedown over the metal bench.
Casey surged up with a hoarse scream, throwing her head back, hoping to crack her skull into his nose. He was a trained combatant though and easily ducked her inexperienced hit. He held her down with a knee in the middle of her back and placed a broad palm over her head, holding her cheek against the cold metal. He reached over her and yanked one of the chains down from the wall, pulling it toward her pinned body.
“Oh god, please stop,” she begged. “Please don’t, Reyes! I’m sorry, I’ll come back to your bed!”
He continued to ignore her as he clasped the metal around her wrist and adjusted the size to fit her slim wrist with such easy precision that she realized he’d had plenty of practice. A shiver of fear wracked her naked body. He reached over her head, the heat from his naked chest warming her back and pulled the chain on the other side down. Casey tried to pull her hand underneath her body in a desperate attempt to hide it from him, but he pried it out and snapped the cuff over her other wrist.
Once she was secure, he backed away from her, trailing his fingers from her head down her back, across her spine and ending in a hard slap across her ass. Casey yelped and jerked. The chains were loose enough that she could rear back. Reyes immediately remedied that. He slid something along the wall, which adjusted the chains until she was forced to lay with her torso flat against the cold bench, her knees on the floor her arms spread wide.
A sacrifice.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Casey shivered helplessly, whimpers of fear erupting from her throat. She managed to bring herself under control enough to ask, “A-are you going to k-kill me?” her voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched as it echoed through the room.
She tried to crane her head back to she could see him where he stood behind her, but it put too much strain on her shoulders and she was forced to lay with her cheek against the cool metal staring at her right wrist chained above the bench. She jumped and cried out as his palm landed harshly across first one of her ass cheeks and then the other.
“Now why, after I have gone through all this trouble to acquire you and assure your health, would I simply dispose of you, nena?” he asked, his voice cool and dark.
He was right. She’d asked a stupid question. Of course, he wasn’t going to kill her. He’d waited months to get his hands on her. He’d killed and tortured for her. He’d provided for her, flown a doctor in for her and taken her to one of the best clinics in the world. But Casey had never been one to think logically when she was threatened. She still couldn’t work out what he meant to do to her, though her lack of clothing was a concerning development.
“A-are you going to hurt me?” she asked, her voice cracking.
She flinched and wiggled her ass, expecting another hit to that already tender flesh, but none came. He chuckled darkly, “Most assuredly, mi amor. If this doesn’t wake you the fuck up, then nothing will.”
“What?” she asked sharply. “What’ll wake me up?”
Her head snapped to the side and up as he pulled her hair back and kissed her hard while running his hand roughly down the arch of her back. He sank his fingers into the flesh of her ass cheek and squeezed until it hurt. She whimpered into his mouth. He was being careful not to wrench her neck, but she was desperately frightened. She knew he intended to have sex with her, but she wasn’t wet at all. It was going to hurt if he tried to fuck her while she was on her knees and chained to a bench in his torture dungeon.
He must have realized that she was too scared to be turned on because he began alternating harsh touches with gentle sweeps of his fingers across her body, as though petting and coaxing her flesh with pleasure before punishing through with pain. The combination started to work as it distracted her terrified brain from worrying about his intentions and focused it on the magic of his flesh against hers. The heat of each strike as he hit her, the burn as it spread across her nerve endings and then the soothing, caressing stroke that would follow.
Reyes shifted to the side of her, the rough fabric of his pants sliding between her legs as he forced his thigh across her labia. She cried out and started to arch into him before she caught herself. He’d spent weeks conditioning her to this kind of delicious torture. Now, he’d chained her down and was giving her a taste of how much darker he could take things if she didn’t give him what he wanted, bent to his will, became his queen on demand.
“Reyes!” she cried out when he reached down, wrapped his hand around her leg above the knee and jerked her legs wide apart. Her knee scraped painfully across the concrete floor.
She wasn’t expecting a hit directly to her tender pussy and screamed in shock when he slapped her there, his fingers smacking against the tender lips of her labia. She jerked hard against the bench, a jolt of pleasure and pain shooting right through her pelvis and up into her torso. Heat flooded her veins and moisture gathered in her core. Before her brain had a chance to process what he’d done to her he slapped her again and again, until the sound of the strikes was undeniably the sound of a hand hitting wet flesh.
“Like that, do you, nena?” he growled, pride throbbing in his deep voice.
He began alternating between slapping her ass in hard strikes and her pussy as she squirmed against the bench, begging him. She was no longer begging him to let her go. Now she was begging for another kind of release. She’d widened her legs even more, uncaring of the scrape against her knees. She could feel the gathering wetness of her pussy beginning to drip down her thighs.
“Oh god, Reyes,” she yelled, her head still twisted so she couldn’t see him. “Please just fuck me now!”
She was so ready to explode into org
asm from the stimulation of his strikes that she was now rocking her hips back into each blow and twisting her shoulders as much as she could to give her even more thrust. She just needed him to let the tip of his finger linger a little longer against her hard, throbbing clit and she would go right over the edge, but it was like he knew! He snatched his hand back the second he sensed he was about to rock her orgasm until she was ready to start screaming in frustration.
“You aren’t ready to be fucked yet, cariña,” he growled from behind her.
“What the fuck do you mean?” she yelled incredulously. “I couldn’t get any wetter if you dumped me in a lake. Fuck me now or die you monster!” she demanded, her voice starting to waver from too much screaming. “I’ll murder you if this is your plan. To make me all horny and then leave me.”
He chuckled. “Not to worry, nena, it’s not my plan to leave you high and… wet,” he chuckled, then he ran his fingers through her sopping pussy and slid two of them deep into vaginal passage, stretching her until she was moaning and squirming. Then he ran them up to the tiny, puckered hole of her ass and spread the wetness there. He said, “It’s not my intention to fuck this pussy at all.”
She froze as he used her natural lubrication to work his fingertip into her ass and begin to stretch her. It took a minute for her brain to catch up to his words and actions. During that time, he managed to work his finger into her incredibly tight ass, wiggling it in until he bottomed out. She cried out and arched her back down toward the bench, wrenching her arms hard against the cuffs.
Scarred Queen (The Queens Book 1) Page 19