Chapter 3

He locked me up.

The estate was in the hills outside the city and everything in it was expensive, but it was still a cage. No phone, no computer, nothing, and four guards outside my door around the clock.

Sevrin Voss was gone during the day and only came back at night. Every night he showed up in my room at the same time, tossed me a white pill, watched me swallow it, and then held me until morning.

That was it. Just held me. He never once put a hand anywhere it shouldn't be. I was something valuable he was keeping in storage, and that was all.

But it was driving me out of my mind. I would rather have been digging through garbage on the street than living like this, controlled every minute, checking his face before I even breathed.

By the third afternoon, I snapped. I picked up everything in that room I could throw and threw it at the door and the windows. An antique vase went to pieces on the floor. I ripped the cord out of a lamp.

"Let me out of here! You sons of bitches!"

I was screaming my head off.

The door opened.

Sevrin Voss walked in wearing a gray turtleneck under a long coat, and the cold came in with him. He looked at the mess on the floor, and nothing showed on his face at all.

"Are you finished?" he asked.

"No!"

I stared at him, grabbed a piece of broken glass off the floor, and put it against my throat. "Let me go or I'll do it!"

He didn't even slow down. He came straight at me.

"Go ahead and try." There was something close to amusement in it. "Your pain runs ten thousand times higher than everybody else's. The second that glass opens your skin, it'll hurt so much you won't be able to finish."

My hand shook and the edge broke the surface. It went off instantly, at full volume, and my eyes went hot.

He was right. I was scared of pain. Terrified of it. But I hated the way he said it even more.

So the moment he got close enough, I changed direction. I turned the glass on him and drove it into his arm.

"Go to hell!"

It tore through the sleeve of his sweater and went deep into his forearm. Blood came up right away and spread out dark across the gray.

The guards came through the door with their hands already going to their belts. Sevrin Voss lifted one hand, and both of them backed out and shut it behind them.

I froze. I'd expected him to move. Someone like him could have gotten out of the way without trying, but he didn't. He didn't even flinch. He stood there and looked at me.

"You..." My voice started to shake. I was still holding the glass and it was wet with his blood. "Why didn't you move?"

He glanced down at my hand. "Let go," he said. "Keep squeezing and you'll cut yourself."

I was scared and furious and past caring about either one. I threw myself at him and bit down on his shoulder, through the sweater, with everything I had, until I tasted blood in my mouth.

I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to understand that I wasn't something he could move around however he liked.

But he still didn't fight back. Instead of pushing me off, he lifted his other hand, the one that wasn't bleeding, and rested it on the back of my head. His palm was wide and cold. He started stroking my hair, slow, over and over.

I went rigid.

I held on until my jaw ached, and then I let go on my own. There was a wide dark patch spreading across his shoulder.

He looked down at me and I couldn't read his expression. He raised his hand and wiped the blood from the corner of my mouth, and when he spoke, his voice hadn't changed at all. He might as well have been asking what I wanted for dinner.

"Are you done biting?"

Something went through me and I backed up two steps.

He was insane. Completely, genuinely insane. Nobody gets hurt like that and feels nothing.

I stared at the blood running down his arm, and a thought came up that I couldn't push back down.

Could he feel pain at all?