Chapter 81

VEDA

With his hand still around my throat, he forced my head down with the other. “Get on your knees, bitch.”

I resisted, shaking my head back and forth, and tried to keep my voice strong. “No. You don’t want to do this. You’re just hurting.”

“So you’re not so scared that you won’t fight me, huh?” He shook the water out of his face. “Good. Fight. You’ve already got me so fucking hard I’m about to blow.”

Even though I knew it would do no good, I did fight him, with one hand wrapped around his arm and the other trying to push him away from me as I tried to dislodge his grip on my throat. My feet slipped and slid on the tiles as I tried to stay standing, his large hand cutting off the air from my lungs. I tried to scream, but it came out garbled and weak. Mario laughed when he heard it.

Pushing down my panic, I forced myself to focus. To remember the things Enzo had taught me in our self-defense classes. Without warning, I let my feet slip out from beneath me and dropped, letting the weight of my body pull us both down, praying I wasn’t about to smash the back of my skull against the tiles.

As I went down, the water sprayed me right in my face and I almost missed the comical look on Mario’s as he lost his footing, throwing out his other hand in an effort to catch himself. His full weight landed on top of me, but I was prepared and used his surprise to twist the arm I was holding, forcing him to release his grip around my neck right before he crushed my windpipe. There was a crack above my head, and I hoped it was his forehead. Or his nose.

When everything stopped, I was lying on my back on the shower floor, the tiles warm and hard against my back and my face tucked into Mario’s hairy armpit. I took stock of my body, but other than the overall feeling of being crushed by his heavier weight, it seemed like I survived with minimal bumps and bruises. But the respite was brief.

“You bitch! You fucking BITCH!”

My heart stopped completely, then began to pound fast and hard as Mario got up, his knee pressing painfully into my hip. I didn’t follow him up, instead I flipped over onto my stomach as soon as his weight was off of me and pushed myself backward, the heel of one of his feet pulling the skin on my side as he barely avoided stepping on me. Blood ran like a river across the tiles and down the drain. I wasn’t sure whose it was, and I wasn’t about to hang around to find out.

If I wasn’t so fucking terrified, this would be comical. Hysterical, even.

I scooched all the way out of the walk-in shower, not stopping until I felt the dry bathroom floor and saw my clothes and towel out of the corner of my eye. Grabbing the entire pile, I rose to my feet. I had no idea where I thought I was going, I just knew I had to get the hell out of there.

Mario’s angry roar followed me as I got my footing and ran into his bedroom, naked as the day I was born, the towel gripped in one tight fist and my clothes in the other, my wet hair hanging in my face. I was halfway to the door when I was pulled up short by a wrenching pain on the back of my head. I screamed as my hair was ripped from my skull, dropping the towel as I grabbed his hand to try to save what hair I could. He let me go, and I was thrown onto the hard floor, twisting in midair. I landed with a grunt as pain shot from my hip and ricocheted down my thigh. “You want me to hurt you? Is that it? You get off on that shit?”

“No.” The word came out with a rush of air.

But he only chuckled as he wiped the blood from the gash on his forehead. “Oh, I think you do. Why else would you have pulled a stunt like that?” Naked as I was, his hard cock stuck out from its nest of curly dark hair and bobbed obscenely in front of his hips.

My nerves stretched taut, and fear made my stomach churn as I screamed, “To get away from you, you fucking psychopath!”

I knew the moment the words were out of my mouth that that was the wrong thing to say as the amusement faded from his eyes, replaced by a fury so cold that if I were a religious person, I’d be praying my ass off right now.

I tried a different tactic. “Mario, please. I’m not who you want. I’m not Nicole.”

“I know you’re not Nicole,” he said. I watched in horror as he gripped his cock in his fist, pumping it a few times. “But Nicole isn’t here. You are.”

“But, but…” Frantically, I tried to think of something that would get through to him. “But you loved her. You were gonna marry her.”

He smiled then, but it was mean and ugly. “I didn’t love her. I loved to fuck her. And I loved the way she looked all dolled up on my arm."

He was lying. I could see in his eyes the way her death haunted him.

He shrugged as he stood over me, casually jacking off with blood running down his face and dripping off his chin. Drops landed on my stomach. “I loved that she was so desperate for a man, she let me do whatever I fucking wanted to her.”