All Chapters of Trapped by the Ruthless Tycoon: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Sunny Cold air tore into my lungs just as my eyes snapped open. I sat up too fast making my heart slammed against my ribs. The room swam: polished marble, dark wood, a wall of glass. Beyond it there was no skyline, no familiar brick. Only black-blue ocean, hurling itself against the rocks far below. What the hell. This wasn’t my apartment. My bedroom had squeaky floorboards and a window that never quite closed. I shoved off the silk duvet and swung my feet to the floor. My head throbbed. I pressed my fingers to my temples and dragged the last thing I remembered into the light. Tuesday night. My kitchen table. Lena had come over with a bottle of sweet white wine to celebrate her raise, chattering about her mean boss, pouring my glass first, I took two sips of wine, it had tasted faintly metallic, bitter at the back of my tongue. Then my arms went heavy, the edges of the room went gray, and everything went dark. Tuesday. The light outside was the thin white of morning. Wait… how m

Sunny I didn’t eat the second tray either. I sat curled on the window seat while the storm worked itself up outside, rain lashing the glass, the lights of the guard posts smeared along the cliff like wet paint. My wrist still showed the pale print of Roman’s fingers. Worse than the mark was the sentence he’d left in my head. One call, and his firm is finished by morning. Aiden. I knew exactly what he would be doing right now. Not storming the precinct. Not chasing leads. Aiden was the kind of man who read the whole manual before he opened the box. He had once stood at the end of a pier for twenty minutes, in August, in his swim trunks, because he couldn’t decide whether the water was safe to jump into. He sketched floor plans on napkins. He believed in forms, in proper channels, in waiting for the police to call back. I loved that about him. It was also the reason I understood, with a, clear certainty, that nobody was going to burst through the door and save me. If I wanted to ge

Sunny The central suite had become a tomb. For three days after my failed escape, I lived inside four walls. The balcony doors were deadbolted from the outside. The windows were locked with key latches. Heavy velvet curtains swallowed the gray water, and two guards sat in the anteroom so close I could hear them breathing. I didn’t mind the locks, I minded the silence it was suffocating. Roman hadn’t come back since then. The last thing he’d said to me was you will live in the dark, and then he had walked out and left me with it. Every hour was a tick on a clock counting down to whatever he’d meant. Was Aiden all right? Had Roman already started with his promise? Was Aiden standing in an empty office right now because of my foolishness? Not knowing was worse than anything Roman could have done to my body. On the fourth afternoon, the lock turned. I didn’t look up from the edge of the bed, because it’s either a tray or doctor, I assumed. Another meal I wouldn’t eat. “A bird in a

Sunny At 10:05, the house had quiet. I stood in my bathroom in soft-soled shoes, listening. Beyond the bedroom door, the guards’ voices rose and fell in the muffled rhythm of a shift change. A short window of chatter. Then new boots, and silence. Now. I crossed to the linen cabinet behind the clawfoot tub and pushed the rolled Egyptian towels aside. A narrow wooden panel rattled loose under my fingers. Behind it, a dark hole breathed out cold air that smelled of old timber and copper wire. I pulled the cabinet door closed behind me as far as I could and climbed into the dark. An iron spiral staircase corkscrewed up through the wall. I lit my way with the phone’s dim screen. Every step rang under my shoes like a bell, and my ears kept tuning to a sound that wasn’t coming: boots on the stairs below, a shout, the click of a gun. When I got to the third level, a brass latch that I eased open into a quiet corridor lit by wall sconces. 10:16. Nine minutes. The study doors were sol

Sunny Roman hadn’t touched me since the terrace. That should have been a relief. After the rain, the kiss, the way he’d laid me on his bed like something he was afraid to break, I had braced for the worst. Instead he’d stood over me a long minute, then gone to sleep on the leather chaise by the window with his jacket over his face, as though the sight of me might change his mind about something. In the morning my things were gone from the guest wing and were hung in his dressing room beside his suits. He didn’t lock me in a cell or chain me to the bed. He did something worse. He folded me into his life. When he took conference calls in his study, I sat in the reading nook with a book I pretended to read. When he dined, a place was set across from him. If he crossed the estate, a guard fell in behind me at a polite distance. It was surveillance in a silk robe. Luxury as a leash. On the fifth morning I sat by the hearth in the master suite, watching the logs spit. No matter how clo