His for the Taking

by Samantha Madisen

  And there was quite a bit of value in that.

  But... if Lucy could be silenced, quietly and kindly, before anyone ever got to her, then Natalia would be fairly safe; still missing, a holy grail that no one would ever find.

  Would she hate me forever?

  Surely she could come to understand the wisdom of my decision?

  But—I reminded myself with bitterness, as I remembered the crucial problem—Natalia seeing the reason behind my actions would require Natalia knowing that Lucy posed a direct threat to her own safety.

  And for that, I would have to tell her the truth. The truth about who she was, about why the connection could never be made. Making it so that she forgave me would destroy her, I knew that. Natalia was someone pure, someone good, and I would do anything to make sure that she was never troubled by the knowledge that her father was a bad man, that she was the secret to something bad.

  Even if it meant that she would hate me.

  Maybe in time, maybe if she had no choice, she would someday forgive me for Lucy.

  I watched the sun go down and settled on my course of action.

  There was no other way.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Natalie

  He was troubled by something so deep I knew I couldn’t penetrate it, and I was afraid to. Maybe I didn’t even want to. When he came back to me, we made love again, and at moments I could feel the same connection that was there after he saved me from the lifeboat, but he would retreat again inside of himself. The distance between us could not be bridged, no matter how intimately we entwined our bodies, no matter how deeply we looked into each other’s eyes.

  He made love to my body gently, but there was something forceful in the way he did it, like he wanted to empty something inside of me and make me see what it was. And then, after I was exhausted and fell asleep, he crept away, leaving me alone and afraid to follow him, afraid to see where he went, afraid to break the beautiful snow globe that had existed for the briefest of moments.

  I loved him, I knew that I loved him and that I could not control it. I felt that he loved me, but there was something terrible in his love, and it poured into me like tar, blackening everything, remaining even after he left. What it was, I wondered if I could ever know.

  I pretended to be asleep when he returned to his room and his weight moved next to me on the bed. He brushed my hair from my face, and it took everything in my power not to respond to his touch, to hold back the hot wet tears that threatened to break through the dam of my eyelids.

  He pressed his lips to my temple and kissed me for a long time, before his weight disappeared just as suddenly.

  When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

  I lay there in the dark, wondering what to do, what was happening. My chest felt like I had swallowed a huge lead weight, so heavy that I couldn’t rise.

  When at last I did, as I threw the covers off, I heard the sound: the faint whump whump whump, almost silent, nothing more than a low change of air pressure.

  I ran to the door and threw it open. “Alaric!” I called, running out to the staircase.

  The black of the helicopter moved like a ghost above, the sound following on its heels, the lights in my eyes as the air rolled over me. I clung to the balcony and watched them disappear in the blackness of the sky.

  I ran down the stairs, through the empty house. “Alaric!” I yelled again and again. I was crying by the time I reached the living room, because I had known all along that he was gone.

  In the living room, silhouetted against the gray sky, illuminated by the lights from the patio and the stairs to the beach, was a figure much like his.

  But I knew, without seeing his face or hearing his voice, that it wasn’t.

  Fear gripped me, and my heart stood still. I stopped so suddenly that I almost fell, and I stood there, the only sound now the waves in the distance and my heart pounding in my chest.

  The figure turned and said nothing. A light came on and illuminated his face.

  Eric.

  “Alaric has gone somewhere,” he said plainly.

  “Why are you here?” I managed to whisper. Nightmarish ideas occurred to me, each one more horrifying than the last, and I clutched my womb and backed away instinctively.

  “I’m not here. I was never here. The less you think of me, the better,” he said coldly. “The man before you is here to see to it that it doesn’t occur to that pretty little head of yours to go on any more boat trips.”

  My heart seized up on me, beating erratically, turning to a cold lump in my chest.

  “Lucy,” I whispered.

  The man in front of me had a face nothing like Alaric’s: he was ruddy complexioned, brown-eyed, with an attractive face that did not rival Alaric’s in perfection or intensity. But his expression was the same: cold, stony-eyed, dark. It did not change, and he offered me nothing when I said her name.

  He stared me down, until I started to back out of the room.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick around with me, my dear,” he said quietly.

  The old me—the foolish me, the me who had thought that some clunky thug like Andrej Sulov was a powerful man—might have been inclined to say something ‘spunky’ to that. Like, “Or what?”

  But now that I had seen the kind of quiet, profound, dark power of men like Alaric—and Eric was one of those men—I knew better.

  “I have to pee,” I almost whispered.

  He said nothing, and seemed to be glaring at me, but he moved in the direction of the hallway to the bathroom between the living room and the kitchen. In his steely glare, I understood that I was to follow him. He walked into the bathroom ahead of me, and my heart sank to hopeless lows; I had asked to go because I wanted to be alone and cry.

  But he was sweeping the room. He picked up the wastepaper basket and swept the spare contents of the cabinets into it, looked in the remaining cupboards, which held only towels, and then walked to where I was standing.

  His look chilled me as though it were made of a cold liquid. I jumped a little when he dipped his hand to a pocket in his black utility pants. It was at that moment that I noticed his forearm, and the tattoo that looked so similar to Alaric’s.

  He snapped something in front of me, just below my chin.

  I shook but held his gaze defiantly. He reminded me of a dog, one you didn’t want to show any fear to. I felt it—surely he knew I did—but I wasn’t going to scream and run away, like I wanted to. I was sure he had a knife beneath my chin. But Alaric wouldn’t leave me with a maniac who would kill me, would he?

  Not even the maniac who had advised him to do just that...?

  My gut twisted. Now I needed to throw up.

  He pushed me aside with one hand, almost smiling as he did.

  Holding the wastepaper basket, and with a skill level I could not fathom, he disassembled the door lock and plopped it into the basket as though he were doing shopping. The tool he had used went back into a pocket on the side of his pants.

  Then he pulled the door behind him, the hole where the lock had been staring at me like an evil eye.

  I backed up and sat down on the edge of the tub, and was just about to let the tears pour out of my eyes when I was aggravated by a moment of fury.

  I snapped the hand towel from the rack and stuffed it into the hole.

  And then, shaking uncontrollably, I sat down again and started to cry.

  I barely made the toilet when I threw up.

  “Five minutes, Natalia,” his voice said, flat and emotionless from behind the door.

  * * *

  I wanted to go back to sleep—to go back in time, to just days before, when Alaric had seemed so close to me, when I had been blinded by love. I was still blinded by it; even though I knew that Alaric was gone to do a terrible thing, and even though I hated him for it, it was impossible to get rid of all the feelings I had for him. I wanted to hate him, and I knew that I could make myself hate him, and I knew that it was right to ne
ver forgive him, but the real feelings inside of me were more complex. I couldn’t stop looking for a way to forgive him.

  Eric watched me silently, his eyes cold and unfeeling. He gave me the creeps, and he also gave me the sensation that he was looking for an excuse to push me off the balcony. So I did what he said, stayed within his sights, and pretended to sleep on the enormous sofa in the living room. I’d have thought the guy would go take a piss once in a while, but he didn’t until morning, when he peed off the side of the balcony, keeping me in his peripheral vision.

  At ten o’clock, he nudged me on the shoulder. “You need to eat something. Come on. Into the kitchen.”

  The meals were usually prepared by Alaric’s ever-rotating cast of service people, who were all silent, seemed to be from totally disparate parts of the planet, and never said a word. If I saw them, they scurried away. But we seemed to be alone on the island. Eric pointed to a chair at the large island. “Sit there.”

  He didn’t ask me what I wanted, just began taking things out of the fridge. I noticed he had three guns strapped to his legs and in a holster on his back. He kept them holstered, but I felt sure he could grab them faster than I could. Just like Alaric.

  It was this kind of thing I knew was part of Alaric’s world, and I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t like guns; I’d never even fired one. Alaric had told me after the boat rescue that the safety had been on the whole time... what did I know? The heavy, steel power hanging all around Eric made my stomach twist.

  I didn’t want to be part of this life, I thought.

  But as soon as I had a thought like that, I would remember Alaric’s body against mine, the way he held me, the way he had looked into my eyes just days before.

  And then I would remember why Eric was here, babysitting me.

  A cold fury would start up in me again.

  Eric set a plate with eggs on a bed of greens in front of me. It looked delicious, but I wasn’t about to just do what he told me.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said quietly.

  Eric’s mouth turned up in a sneer. “Eat. Your breakfast.”

  I took a fork in my hand and I gripped it tightly. Eric’s eyes fell to look at my hand, and he smiled. “Don’t think of doing anything funny.”

  I thought about it defiantly, but if I was going to get away from Eric, I would have to do it some other way.

  “Eat.”

  I cut into the poached eggs. I had to admit, the guy was a good cook. For an evil assassin type.

  “What will he do to her?” I asked, after taking a bite. I couldn’t stand the silence, Eric’s terrible glower bearing down on me. Especially not while, right now, my friend was being murdered.

  Eric just stared at me with the same unreadable expression on his face.

  I dropped my fork. “Is there some reason you can’t tell me? It’s not like I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  His face didn’t change.

  “What do you get out of this?” I snapped.

  Eric shook his head ever so slightly. “I owe Alaric a favor. This is it.” He leaned forward and picked up some of the spinach between his fingers. “If it were any other way,” he said, stuffing the spinach into his mouth, “there isn’t any amount of money he could pay me to get involved in this shit.” He looked down at the spinach. “Finish that off. It’s fucking brilliant.”

  It was, but I tried my best to look mad about having to eat it.

  “Lucy’s my friend,” I said, and I didn’t even expect myself to speak before I did. It just sort of erupted. “I owe her a favor. Can’t you just...” My eyes welled up with tears.

  Eric rose up to his full height and looked at the ceiling. “Alaric’s a clean killer,” he said coldly. “This girl won’t even see it coming.”

  The sob that swelled up inside of me came from deep inside and rushed like a wave against the confines of my body. But I didn’t want to cry anymore in front of Eric, so I tried to keep it inside. I stood up, and he looked at me with a cold curiosity. I wanted to go to my room, to lock the door on him, to hide away. I looked around the kitchen, and saw the knife he had used to prepare the food. It was small, but if I could just get it, I would be—

  The grief of imagining Alaric, moving like a panther toward the helpless Lucy to kill her, however painlessly, however ‘clean’ he might be, ripped through me again.

  I had stopped breathing. The sob inside of me was trapped there, and I couldn’t inhale. I hadn’t for almost a minute, and the pain of not breathing mixed with the pain of the man I loved being someone I needed to hate...

  I wasn’t thinking clearly as I stepped toward the counter with the knife. Stars began to creep into my field of vision, and I felt my stomach moving, trying to force my lungs to breathe. I did breathe, and then I was breathing too much, and then, suddenly, everything was black.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the first time I had woken up tied up, and I was surprised that my body had learned so quickly that I could lie there and be awake, while taking in my situation with my ears, before opening my eyes.

  I was tied at the wrists, and by shifting a little, I could feel that I was most likely not tied at the ankles. My arms were in front of me, and I was on my side, with one leg over the other. I was on a hard surface.

  I could hear the ocean in the far distance, and feel a light breeze, the kind that came eternally through the windows here. For a moment, I was able to pretend that I was waking from a nice nap, and that I could get up, walk down to the beach, and find Alaric on his boat. He would see me, smile at me, and hop onto the dock.

  That was the fantasy I carried around with me, and as the memories of the long and terrible evening and morning with Eric rose like a tide inside my head, I was dragged down and away from my fantasy, back to the nightmare of loving a man who was a bad man, a man who killed, a man who kidnapped. Warm, wet tears built up behind my eyelids. How could I still have feelings for him? How could I have ever been so stupid as to fall in love with him, or to believe that he had fallen in love with me?

  And now I had his child inside of me.

  I felt sick, and I bent toward my own stomach and chest as my eyes flew open. My hands met resistance above me—they were tied by rope to a column in the living room. I was on the floor, facing the glass doors that slid open to the patio overlooking the cove.

  I saw shadows move across the floor, and then the black boots and black pants that Eric had been wearing. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight. Another shadow moved. I closed my eyes, fear seizing me in an icy grip. I didn’t know what I feared exactly—just that I wished I could make all of this go away, as if it had never happened.

  “Why is she on the floor?”

  It was Alaric’s voice. I wanted to hate him, to fear him, to feel nothing but anger, but instead I felt relief.

  “She’s in recovery position,” Eric replied, and the shadows moved, a temporary break in the sunlight cooling the side of my face. “She didn’t take the news too well. I gave her a sedative. She was hyperventilating.”

  I waited, my heart feeling like it would explode with grief and love and anger all at the same time, for Alaric to answer, but he didn’t. The shadows shifted again, and his fingers touched my neck. I could feel my tears welling up again.

  “Her pulse is racing,” he said. His hand pressed against the back of my forehead. “You sure it’s nothing else?”

  I felt someone’s fingers on my wrist. “It’s high. She’s probably awake. She’s mad as hell at you.”

  I could feel my heart begin to beat faster, and I wanted to punch Eric in the face for being right, for betraying the last secret I felt I could have. Any minute now, I’d have to open my eyes, make this whole reality come alive again. And what would I do? How could I live with Alaric when I knew what he had done? How could I live with myself when I still wanted him, somewhere deep down inside, even though he had killed my friend?

  Where would I go, even if I did want to leave this ni
ghtmare?

  I opened my eyes. Alaric was looking down at me, the same concerned expression on his face that he had had when he rescued me from the boat.

  My heart flipped, and I had a soaring moment of hope. My eyes were blurring over with my tears. I heard Eric say, “See? Awake.”

  “Did you do it?” I said weakly.

  Alaric’s face clouded over, and he stood up. “It’s done,” he said to no one in particular. Then, to Eric, “The copter is waiting for you.”

  There was a silence. I couldn’t see much because my eyes were welling over with hot tears, and my chest felt tight again. But this time I didn’t care if I showed it. Fuck him, I thought.

  “See what I mean?” Eric said. There was a pause. “I’m going to give you some advice one last time—”

  “Save it,” Alaric said. “You’re done with your favor.”

  “This is a freebie, man. You need to—”

  “I have it handled.” Alaric cut his friend off, and their footsteps receded, as I bent over and made a hideous sound of grief.

  I heard the helicopter over my head, and then I felt Alaric untying me. I was still crying, unable to make a sound except the gasp of air to breathe.

  “I hate you,” I said, pushing him away as he tried to hold me. I started to hit him. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  I tried to stand up, but I was too unsteady—I supposed the sedative had been a lot stronger than I thought. Alaric caught me in his arms and held me tight to his chest. His fingers went into my hair. “Natalia, stop,” he said softly. “Stop, just listen to me—”

  “I won’t!” I shouted, hitting him with my fists. “I won’t listen to you, ever.”

  I was saying things I didn’t really feel. It was the right thing to do, to hate him, and if I said it enough I could make it true. I owed that much to Lucy. I was just brainwashed and he had warped my mind and my feelings, but nothing could take away that he was an evil killer. My body wanted him to hold me forever, but I had to freeze him out. I pictured Lucy, and I squeezed my eyes tightly to keep her face in my mind and my desire to hate Alaric alive in my chest.