Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Straddling my hips, she curled her tiny hands into fists and pounded on my chest. “Too late! Too late! You bastard! Why? Why? Why?”
Deserving every strike, I stopped trying to restrain her and took the body blows.
She continued to pound on my chest as she cried. At first it was incoherent but then I caught one desperate phrase being sobbed over and over again.
I could have loved you.
I could have loved you.
I could have loved you.
She might as well have had a dagger in her hand.
After several minutes, her strikes lessened and she leaned her forehead against my chest and just sobbed.
Olivia cried harder than I had even known was possible.
It was heart-wrenching to witness.
I crushed her to my chest, wrapping one arm around her back and cradling her head with the other.
She never said another word; just laid against my chest and let it all out.
At first, I clenched my jaw and refused to take any responsibility.
This was not on me.
This was on Luc.
Her brother did this.
He knew I had to strike back.
Honor demanded it.
Still, I had wanted to destroy Olivia’s reputation, not her soul.
Fuck … not even I believed the bullshit excuses I just made.
CHAPTER 32
OLIVIA
That euphoric, precious moment between sleep and awareness, where there was no reality, no pain, no heartache … I was denied even that small respite.
From the very moment awareness creeped into my consciousness, the unrelenting humiliation, betrayal, and anguish from last night crashed down on me.
There was also pain, both emotional and physical.
I stretched out my arm and felt the cool sheets on the other side of the bed.
Marksen had not slept in the bed.
After losing it in the bath, I had once more become detached, as if both my mind and body had cocooned into survival mode. I remembered him lifting me up in his arms and holding me tight as he dried us both off. He’d carried me into the bedroom where he’d wrapped me in a blanket and left.
Now, realizing he wasn’t beside me, I wondered if he had left the building.
There was an immediate, empty ache in my chest at the thought, which was beyond twisted and wrong. I must be the worst kind of Stockholm masochist to want the comfort of my cruel captor.
And there was no mistaking it now, that was what Marksen was … my captor.
All the stupid fantasies I may have created in my mind about what we were or could have been had burned to cinders on that stone dais like an ancient sacrifice the moment he ripped off my mask.
In that moment, he ripped off his own mask too and I saw him for who he truly was, a cold-hearted, ruthless bastard who cared nothing for me … and never had.
After all, who cared about a pawn?
Between the deep-seated ache in my thighs and my splitting headache, I just wanted to crawl under the covers and never come out, but my stomach growled, and my mouth tasted like I had swallowed rancid cotton, dry and foul.
With a huff, I threw the covers off. I needed to brush my teeth, drink my body weight in coffee, and probably take a questionable number of aspirin.
Not enough for a Girl, Interrupted moment, but enough to be a potential cause of an ulcer.
If the events of last night were any indication, maybe I did need a few weeks in an inpatient facility. How had I gone from sex goddess dissociating to the point of enjoying my own ravagement on a stone altar in front of hundreds of strangers to letting the man who had done that to me hold me while I cried about it?
How did a sane, intelligent, rational woman do that?
They didn’t.
Clearly, I had lost my mind, my sanity was in question, and I needed to see my therapist and have her send me away to some therapeutic boot camp where I could learn how to value myself enough to make better life choices and not get dick-ma-tized by the first man to give me an orgasm.
I knew that wasn’t why I had so many conflicting feelings. They had nothing, or at least very little, to do with the orgasms.
They had to do with the man I had thought Marksen was.
The one I fell for as a girl.
That teenager was still inside me and still wanted Marksen to be hers.
She needed to grow the fuck up and remind herself that she was a fucking Manwarring.
After hobbling my way into the way too bright bathroom, I stole some of Marksen’s bougie French handmade, small-batch mouthwash in its expensive glass bottle. I hated that it had one of the best subtle mint flavors I had ever tasted. I made a mental note of the name, Buly’s Eau De La Belle Haleine, and its distinctive label with a large snake.