Chapter 5

"That guard you looked at so dreamily already lost his head. And still you haven't learned that you belong to me — only to me." He growled.

"You're insane, you killed an innocent man, I swear I wasn't looking at him!" I screamed desperately.

He pulled my head back by the hair and I felt a sharp pain at the crown of my head. "I'm insane, am I? You think I didn't see the way he looked you over, head to toe? The way you looked back at him?"

"That didn't happen!" I pulled at my restraints, feeling the shackles cutting into my wrists above my head. He completely ignored my attempts of having a normal conversation for once.

"Because you're my wife, I'll give you the privilege of choosing your own punishment." Luka said — though I couldn't see him through the blindfold, I felt his breath against my ear and knew he was standing somewhere behind me.

"Do you want the whip, or something more creative?" he said, his voice soft, almost mocking. I bit my lip, feeling powerless to say anything, certain that any word from me would only provoke him further. What I hadn't expected was that my silence would provoke him just as badly.

"Not going to cooperate, then?" He sighed, feigning disappointment. "Then it'll have to be at least thirty lashes."

I shook my head frantically, a chill running down my spine — my skin hadn't even had time to heal from the last punishment. I felt the first strike land against the tender skin of my bare ass, and my head snapped back. The sound that left me was some tangled thing between pain and heavenly enjoyment because in the next moment his hand moved to my clit and he pressed a vibrator against it in a way that blurred the two completely, and my head found its way back against his shoulder.

"That's it," he murmured against my ear, his voice low and unhurried, promising and cruel at once. "Don't worry. I'm not that merciless. I'll let you come thirty times as well" I could feel exactly how much control he still had left, and exactly how little he intended to give.

"Tell me now," he said, "who does your body belong to. Who owns every breath you take?"

Three days ago

My eyebrows drew together on their own. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing correctly. I thought my father had been chasing after us. Where had Luka come from now? How could he have known that I was going to try to escape? Questions formed in my mind like dominoes, yet not a single one made it past my lips.

Just when I thought how nice it would be to simply relax and fall asleep right where I was, I felt a firm hand wrap around my arm. Luka crouched down and, with one smooth, swift movement, pulled me to my feet. Not the slightest bit gently, without any consideration for the fact that the world was spinning before my eyes.

Instinctively, I took a step backward and felt a rush of blood pounding into my head like a hammer. I tried to turn around, desperately searching for Eliot through the smoke and darkness that swallowed every contour of the road. I couldn’t see anything around me except a hundred shades of blue and green bleeding together across my field of vision.

“Eliot!” I called out, but my voice sounded foreign to me, somehow broken. My head was throbbing, and the image of the world around me was splitting into two, three reflections at once. “Please,” I whispered, grabbing onto Luka’s arm with whatever strength I had left. “Let me go. I have to help him, I have to—”

He didn’t even look at me. With one quick movement, he jerked me forward, and I clung even tighter to his elbow out of fear of losing my balance again. He dragged me several meters in a direction I didn’t recognize, firmly and without a word, as though he were dragging a sack over his shoulder rather than a woman he had once, in another life, held as though she were his entire world.

Half-conscious, the only thing I could make out was his voice, cold and calm, speaking through clenched teeth.

“What do you think you are doing? Trying to make a fool of me?”

His words made no sense to me. Nothing made sense to me. He didn’t want this marriage any more than I did, so why was he reacting like this now? My leaving would give him a peaceful continuation of his life and a clear conscience. It would have freed him from me, from this marriage, from the obligation of spending a year pretending to be my husband.

My vision still hadn’t returned, but I felt him suddenly shove me forward, and I instinctively stretched my hands out in front of me. Instead of the ground, which I had inevitably expected, my hands felt the cold metal of a hood. I exhaled air I hadn’t realized I had been holding in my lungs when I realized I was leaning against a car, and I remained in that position because my legs were shaking violently and the world was still swaying around me.

I felt him release my arm for a moment to open the car door. It was the only moment of freedom I had felt since the moment I landed in America. And I used that moment without thinking. I pushed myself away from the car and started running back. However, I don’t think I had taken even three steps before I felt a strong arm wrap around my waist, encircling my body. I turned toward him and started struggling, trying to fight him off with arms that were weak and unsteady. He was stronger and faster, and with one movement, almost careless in its ease, he pulled me back toward the car and shoved me into the back seat before slamming the door harder than necessary.

I fell onto the seat like a rag doll, my entire weight collapsing against it, a sound of utter protest escaping my throat. As I tried to push myself up with my hands and stand, he had already settled beside me on the other side, while the driver started the engine and accelerated before I could even catch my breath.

My head turned instinctively toward the rear window, and I desperately tried to catch even the silhouette of the wrecked car, even the faintest trace of light where Eliot had been left behind. But that sight had long since been swallowed by the dust Luka’s car left in its wake as it sped over the dirt and gravel, until everything merged into the darkness that was growing farther and farther away.

I sobbed quietly and bitterly. With the back of my hand, I wiped away the tear that had found its way down my cheek.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked, my voice breaking with every word. “Luka, please. Remember what we used to be to each other.”

After fifteen seconds of silence that felt like five or six hours spent in agony, his answer finally came, cold as steel.

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”

The weight and coldness of his words left me literally speechless, and all I could do was feel my lips part slightly in sheer shock. Something inside me told me not to push this conversation any further, and I listened to that voice. He was silent for the rest of the drive as well. The only hint of humanity I sensed in him came when he silently tossed a tissue into my lap without looking at me, as though he was uncomfortable watching the blood drying on my face after it had run from my lip. Carefully, I picked up the tissue and brought it to my lips, wiping away the blood with a gentle movement of my hand, then raised my eyes and fixed my gaze into the distance through the window.

My vision had mostly returned, and my coordination was better too, although I still felt as though I had been run over. I couldn’t make out much of anything outside because the car was moving so fast, but I could see enough to realize that the landscape was changing—I recognized the rows of trees, the surrounding houses with the occasional light visible in the distance, the familiar outlines of the estate ahead of us, the estate where I had grown up. My heart tightened with a new kind of fear.

“What will happen to Eliot?” I managed to ask, this time louder. “Let him go, Luka. He’s not guilty of anything, he doesn’t know anything about—”

He ignored me. He actually ignored me. He casually stared at his phone and scrolled through the news while I felt as though I were talking to the trees we were leaving behind in the dust.

“Please,” I continued, my voice rising as I lost control, not even realizing that I had started shouting. “He has nothing to do with you, with any of this. Let him go—”

My shouting was silenced by one sudden movement from him. I expected anything in that moment, but not for him to throw his phone onto the seat beside him, then turn toward me in the same second and grip my chin with a hand as firm as steel. He brought his face inches from mine, and once again I was so close to those beautiful eyes, which now reflected nothing but eternal emptiness and terrifying darkness, nothing resembling the eyes of the man I had once watched with fascination.

“Forget about him,” he said quietly, dangerously, “if you want him to come out alive from that wreckage that used to be the damn car.”

I stopped breathing.

“His life is in your hands now,” he continued, without loosening his grip. “Do what you’re told if you ever want to see him alive again.”

“What have you turned into?” I whispered, tears spilling freely now, tears I no longer even tried to stop.

He released my face, almost disgusted with his own gesture, and the sudden movement sent my body flying backward until I leaned against the door behind me. He looked out the window before answering.

“Exactly what your family wanted me to become.”

I shook my head frantically. That wasn’t true. None of what he believed was true. I wanted so badly to tell him my perspective on everything that had happened, but I was slowly beginning to realize that there was no talking or arguing with him anymore. He simply wasn’t the same man he had once been. And that hurt. It hurt knowing that decades of lies and the war between our families had turned such a man into this. That his humanity had been erased the day he decided that what he had heard from his father was the truth.

Ahead of us, the headlights of the car illuminated our steel gate. The alarm began wailing through the night within seconds, and exactly what I had expected would happen if anyone from his family approached our estate—or if any of us approached theirs—was happening. The silhouettes of my father’s armed men emerged from the darkness, each of them pointing his gun straight at the windshield of Luka’s car. Neither he nor his driver seemed the least bit disturbed by it, or at least that was how it appeared.

I saw my father rush out of the house and make his way toward the gate, and in the split second before he composed himself, I recognized pure, undisguised shock on his face. Luka got out first, walked around the car at an easy pace, ignoring the armed security and my father, who immediately raised his voice. He opened my door and pulled me out by the arm without the slightest gentleness. Just when I thought someone was going to open fire and turn the place into a bloodbath, Luka shoved me straight into my father’s arms.

“What did you do to her?” Richard exploded, his voice making me want to cover my ears with my hands, his arm tightening firmly around my shoulder, almost painfully.

“It wasn't his fault,” I blurted out quickly, trying to calm the situation. “We had an accident, Dad, it wasn’t—”

“Your daughter just tried to run away to London with her boyfriend,” Luka cut me off, his voice calm, almost bored, as though he were stating a fact about the weather rather than tearing something inside me apart.

My father released me from his embrace as quickly as he had pulled me into it moments earlier. He looked at me with an expression of disgust that hurt more than any accident could have, and his wasn’t the only gaze fixed on me. Behind him, my mother came running toward us from the house, covering her mouth with her hand when she saw the state I was in. She silently looked at all of us, but she didn’t dare say a word in front of my father.

Richard and Luka exchanged a few sentences, quietly and coldly, like two men solving a business problem rather than deciding the future of their children.

“The last thing in the world I want is this marriage,” Luka said without emotion. “But we both know what will happen to our families if it doesn’t happen.”

Richard nodded, briefly, finally, and without hesitation. “I agree.”

“Tomorrow,” Luka continued, “our families and lawyers need to meet. We need to settle the wedding and the paperwork.”

Richard nodded again.

“Can I trust you,” Luka asked, looking him straight in the eyes, “to keep her in the house until the wedding?”

I desperately looked at my father and mother, clinging to the last trace of hope I had left in my chest, silently begging them to say something, anything, that would mean there was still someone on my side.

“Don’t worry,” Richard said coldly, without even looking at me. “She’s not going anywhere.”

Something inside me broke at that moment, more quietly than I expected, but more completely than anything else that had happened that night.

The armed men lowered their weapons. Richard and Luka nodded at each other as though they had just closed a real estate deal rather than sold my life and my future. Without so much as a glance backward, Luka returned to his car and disappeared down the tree-lined driveway.

I stood beside my mother, trembling helplessly as I tried to find the right words when my father turned toward me.

“Dad,” I began in a thin voice, “you didn’t really mean that, did you—”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence. His hand flashed before I even saw the movement, and the slap echoed louder than any alarm that night. He had never hit me before. My head spun harder than it had after the accident, and my breath caught, trapped in my throat.

My mother sucked in a shocked breath, and from the doorway of the house, where she had stood unnoticed throughout the entire scene, Grandma spoke up as well.

“Alexander, don’t hit her!” the old woman shouted, her voice trembling with agitation, confused as always, believing Richard was her long-deceased husband. “If she doesn’t want to go to piano lessons, she doesn’t have to!”

Richard clenched his jaw, furious that someone had witnessed the scene, furious that a helpless old woman had reprimanded him like a child in front of his security men. “Go inside,” he ground out through his teeth, without looking directly at anyone, then turned and walked into the house without another word.

Olivia came running out of the darkness toward me and my mother and draped her coat over my shoulders. They took me by the arms and began leading me toward the house. I felt my legs give way, felt myself breaking apart completely from the inside, and finally allowed everything I had been holding in since the moment Luka had stopped the car on the road to come pouring out.

“I don’t want this marriage,” I sobbed, clutching my mother’s hand. “Please, let me go back to London, please—”

“Quiet,” my mother whispered through clenched teeth, almost desperately, glancing toward the house, afraid my father would hear us. “Quiet, Vivian, please.”

Olivia took me to my room and stayed with me while I took off the dress that had been torn in several places. She cleaned the blood and dirt from my face with a cotton cloth soaked in something that stung slightly.

“Should we call a doctor?” Olivia asked quietly, touching the bruise that had already formed on my cheek. “You’re pretty badly bruised.”

“No,” I answered in an empty voice. “I don’t want a doctor.”

She helped me put on my pajamas and lie down in bed. I hugged the pillow against my chest as though it could protect me from everything that was coming. I heard her moving around the room for a few more seconds, though I didn’t look to see what she was doing, and then she left the room, turning off the light behind her, leaving me alone with the darkness and a silence that was far louder than any noise could have been.

I lay motionless, listening to the muffled commotion of my parents somewhere downstairs and the footsteps outside my door—heavy, rhythmic, definitely guards, stationed there to keep me like a prisoner rather than a daughter. My thoughts kept drifting toward Eliot, toward the image of the car wrecked on the road, toward the question of whether he was even alive, and tears slipped down my temples and into the pillow.

I thought of my phone. Maybe he had called. Maybe he had texted. Maybe there was some news about him, anything at all, that would tell me I wasn’t alone in this nightmare. I reached my hand across the nightstand, over the bed, onto the floor beside it.

My phone was nowhere to be found. And I had just realized who had taken it less than half an hour ago.