“I mean no one including Master Lev.”
She blinks just once at the unexpected instructions, but she doesn’t say anything else before nodding and heading towards the basement. Meanwhile, I go back up to my room. Alyssa is still sleeping soundly, completely unaware that she’s about to become a much more permanent fixture here than she ever could have guessed.
She’s going to get very feisty, very quickly when she figures that out.
It’s too tempting to think of crawling into bed with her, letting my hands run over her body. She felt so good earlier, squirming beneath my fingers and clenching around my cock. But that would definitely violate my “no repeats” rule.
Of course, it would also prove her wrong—which is a justification that I like a little too much.
I should be thinking about moving her somewhere more removed. Fuck knows I have safehouses aplenty across the city, the country, the globe. And with Lev in the house, stashing Alyssa here is far too risky.
But I can’t abide the thought of having her anywhere else.
I tell myself it’s because I need to keep an eye on her, but the truth is not that simple. I just scratched the surface tonight. I’ve yet to figure this woman out and until I do, her blunder has given me the perfect excuse to keep her under my thumb.
She won’t be staying forever. Nor do I want her to. But I can’t escape the fact that I want her here now.
If only so that I can split her open further and figure out how she works.
11
ALYSSA
Why do I feel like I’m drowning?
It takes a minute before I register that my eyes are still closed and I’m caught between the sleeping world and the waking one.
“Ugh,” I moan as I try to pry my eyelids open. I feel like I’ve been asleep for centuries, but they’re still stubbornly heavy.
Next question: why is it so wet?
I peel my face from a mattress that feels like cotton candy and discover the embarrassingly large circle of drool I’ve been sleeping on. Well, that explains the wetness. I tuck a pillow over the puddle and straighten up.
Why is it so dark? Did I forget to draw my bedroom curtains last night? Maybe that’s why it feels so stuffy in here…
Wait.
Where is “here,” exactly?
The realization that I’m not actually in my own bed hits me like a ton of bricks to the head. I’m not in my own room.
So… where the hell am I?
I jerk out of the bed and look around, suddenly wide awake. I’m in a huge space with high, arching ceilings and yet I feel extremely claustrophobic. It doesn’t take much to figure out why. There are no windows in this room. The only door looks like something out of a medieval castle and, try as I might, I can’t seem to open it.
Where. Am. I?
And then it comes back to me like a slideshow, one image after another in quick succession.
The package.
The fence.
Garfield.
Uri Bugrov.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
The slideshow doesn’t let up. My head is spinning and I’m dangerously close to falling but the memories are relentless.
Dinner. Sex on the table. A finger in my freezer. Uri again. The breakin. Scallops and an inappropriate apron.
Uri fucking Bugrov.
I look up at the ceiling as goosebumps erupt all over my body. Am I still in his mansion? Am I locked away somewhere deep and cold and dark so that no one can find me?
The finger. He knows I have his package. He knows I opened it. He—
The breakin. The cop from last night. Alyssa! You fucking idiot! It was all a ruse, a stupidly simple plan to get me out of the house so that he could search it. Of course. Why the hell hadn’t I seen it before?
Because you were listening to your vagina instead of your brain, that’s why.
“Breathe,” I tell myself, scrambling for my phone. “Wasn’t that one of the steps? Oh, no…”
I don’t have my phone on me. I didn’t have time to grab it last night before Uri pulled me out of my house and into his own.
“There has to be a way out of here,” I mutter to the blank walls.
I try the door again. It still doesn’t budge. So I resort to banging on it and screaming. Nobody hears me. Or if they do, they ignore me. After minutes of screaming myself hoarse, I turn back to the basement and start nervously pacing around.
As it turns out, it’s a bigger space than I first thought. I find a little nook filled with books and next to it, what looks like a makeshift fort fashioned out of sheets and throw pillows.
The fort throws me for a loop. What the hell is this place? Better yet… whose place is it?
I keep exploring in search of answers. There’s a kitchenette separated from the main area by a half-wall. I note stickers pasted onto the white cabinets and a bunch of child’s doodles on the walls here and there.
Crayons lie scattered on the floor outside the bathroom—which, to my dismay, is also windowless. More kids’ stuff is strewn around. Video games, model airplanes. If I had to guess, I would say that this room belonged to a ten-year-old boy.
Except that it’s more of a self-contained apartment than a room, which doesn’t track. And again, it has no freaking windows!
After a good hour of searching, I’m forced to admit defeat. This place is airtight. Probably soundproof, too. Unless there’s a hidden trap door somewhere, it looks like my ass is staying put.
Panic. Panic. Panic.
But apart from crying or screaming, I don’t even have an outlet for the emotion that’s raging around inside me. I wish I had my breakin-case-of-emergency Ben & Jerry’s handy, but even if I was home, there’s no way in hell I’d go anywhere near my freezer. Besides—I have zero appetite. The mere thought of food makes me want to throw up.
That sets off a little reminder in my head. I’m supposed to be at the pharmacy right now, getting Plan B!
Oh, fuck me sideways.
Plan A was Plan B. Plan B is… pray?
I guess so. Put my hands together, get on my knees, and pray to any deities who might be listening that I’m in no danger of getting pregnant. That’s looking like my only option.
This just goes to show that some things really are too good to be true. Multi-orgasmic intercourse with a man who looks like he was designed by someone who’s been listening to my wet dreams? Way, way too good to be true.
It’s not that he’s a bad guy—at least, I don’t think. He’s just a broken one. Deep down, there’s a good human in there. But you can’t see it until you peel back the layers, force him to open up. Yeah, that fear of intimacy theory that I’d thrown at him last night? I didn’t just pull it out of my ass. I’ve spent months thinking about it, wondering what it might be like to be in Uri Bugrov’s stratosphere.
Not just because he looked like sex incarnate.
But because, deep down, I feel the need to fix broken things.
As it turns out, some things, some people aren’t fixable. And if you try, you end up broken yourself. Or, in my case—
Trapped in a basement with no windows.
12
URI