Wake to Dream(32)
He turned to her at that moment, his body dangerously close to hers, his hair brushing over his shoulder as he angled his head in question while mocking her with lazy and admiring eyes. Scanning her body, his liquid gaze started at her hips, settling on her breasts as they worked their way up until coming to lock with the terror behind her eyes. “Do you think you could do that, Alice? To me or anybody else that pisses you off?”
As if daring her to commit the act, he pulled the cleaver from the soapy water, washed it slowly until all traces of the meat he’d used it to cut were absent from the blade and handed it to her to rinse and dry to a perfect polish. The blade was heavy in her hand as she worked the towel over the surface, fear reflected back at her behind the darker blue color of her gaze rimmed red by tears that hadn’t stopped falling.
She shrugged before swallowing down the venomous knot of seething, jagged hatred that clogged her throat and cut off the air she needed to breathe into her lungs. “You said I was a fighter. What makes you think I couldn’t?”
“I never said you couldn’t,” he finally answered, his hand working slowly over a platter that he’d used to carry the food to the table. “I said you don’t have it in you, not unless you were pushed that far. However, in this house and in this particular situation, you’re powerless to do anything with that cleaver because you’d only end up killing yourself in the process.”
A shiver crawled along her spine nestling at the base of her neck, the hair standing on end where it settled. “You’d use the cleaver on me?” It was a hope she couldn’t allow herself to digest fully because too many other factors came into play. Namely, that if she died, what would happen to her sister?
“I’d never use it on you.” Spoken with a matter of fact tone that covered the darkness in his voice, he washed another plate before talking to her again. “But this house is impossible to escape unless you know the codes, and dying from starvation or thirst can’t be the most pleasant way to go. Killing me would only trap you in a cage, Alice, a cage you have no hope to escape in time.”
Her mind spun down a dizzying spiral, the truth of his words smacking against her every so often as they spun along right beside her. Thoughts brought back to her mind’s eye all the metallic panels and flashing lights that proved turning a simple key or deadbolt lock wouldn’t deliver her to freedom. She’d hated technology as she’d watch it manifest in the modern world while she grew, and she hated it now more than ever. Modern devices had served to put people all over the world in contact with each other at the touch of a button, while removing them from participating in their every day lives with the people who were sitting right next to them. Now, as the situation in her case had turned out, it also prevented her escape from a man she wished existed on some other part of the planet far away from where she or her sister had once lived their ordinary, non-tragic lives.
After finishing the last dish, he watched her as she polished off the beads of hot water and placed it in a rack.
“We’ve both had a difficult day. I think it’s time for us to see if we can get some sleep.”
A few seconds before and she would have sworn the situation couldn’t get worse, but he’d proven her wrong with two sentences.
Her legs became jelly beneath her, sticky sweat reaching out to grasp onto the fabric of her dress and hug it tightly against her skin. “Bed? Am I…are we…”
He studied her with amusement, the height he had over her making her feel like a small child. With a calculated gaze that was as mysterious and beautiful as an iceberg turned so that its belly breached the surface, his eyes were as cold and unforgiving as the ocean that harbored those deadly islands of ice that had sunk so many ships.
“Take the stairs up to the bedroom. Sit down on the edge of the bed. I’ll be up in a moment to give you your night clothes.”
Panic set in, her body trembling as she put distance between them, happy to walk away but not happy about where she was going.
She could refuse, could attempt to find a place to hide in the large three story house, but with the cameras and monitors she knew he had tucked away and hidden, she would only be risking another terrifying show like the one he’d played out for her earlier.
Mounting the stairs with a hesitant foot, she climbed them one by one, each step reminding her of what she’d seen on the television screen that stood proudly in the sitting room off the study. Max hadn’t wasted any time teaching her the valuable lesson of what would become of the woman he kept caged in a room that belittled a happy, functional childhood; a place where the pinks ran with blood and the bed sheets were stained by the evidence of his violence and lust.
Reaching the top floor, she shook her head of the images that were seared on her psyche, of the muffled screams and pleading words that she only understood because she would have been crying the same desperate pleas had a man bent her over to flip her skirt to her back and force himself inside.
Her hand grasped the doorway of the bedroom where she’d earlier gotten dressed, the chains above the bed still foreboding where they swung from a ceiling that arched up beautifully with thick wood beams that followed the curve of the domed roof that was so typical of a house as beautiful as this.
Forcing herself inside, she sat on the edge of the bed, her legs heavy where they were pressed together, her mind a wash of pain because, rather than breaking a window and screaming for help, she was planted right where he’d told her to go.