She stared straight ahead as he fondled her. “What pleases you pleases me.”
“Enthusiasm,” he snapped.
She looked down at him, into his eyes. She smiled, rocked her hips.
“Better. Tonight, it’s going to please me to have you laid out on this very table, a tasty entrée. It will please me to fuck you while my guests watch, then it will please me to watch while they do whatever they want to you. Use you, abuse you.”
He pinched her thigh, hard enough to mark it, then went back to his breakfast.
“Oh, not too much, just enough.
“You’ll be a delicious centerpiece we can devour. One in your cunt, one in your ass, one in your mouth. I need to see your full potential while you entertain me and my guests.”
“My potential.”
“That’s right. It’s time I have my monthly parties again. You’ll be the star.” His eyes went hard when she said nothing. “I expect gratitude for giving you this privilege, for making you a showpiece.”
“Gratitude,” she repeated.
“Yes, gratitude, for that, and this.” He cut a small piece of steak, tossed it to the floor. “Eat it. Get down on your hands and knees and eat it so you remember what you are. My dog.”
Her chin dropped to her chest. A dog. She’d had a dog once, and loved him so. She’d been a girl once. She’d been free once.
Her heart wept and wept.
She started to lower to her hands and knees, and he laughed.
“Good doggie.”
Then her hand was on the knife, and the knife plunged into his throat even as her collar ripped pain through her.
She screamed, against the pain, against the years of fear and humiliation. She stabbed again.
“Move in, Dallas!” Feeney shouted. “Dining room, heat sources—one fading. Entrance subject on the run in that direction.”
“Move in!” Eve ordered, and leaped through the door when Roarke dropped the locks.
Beyond the expansive foyer with its golden sand tiles and towering ceilings a wide staircase swept. From beyond that came the screams. Eve shifted her attention right, left, up, as she rushed across the tiles into plush, empty rooms washed in sunlight.
As she did, the screams stopped. She heard a voice—female—in a tone of quiet pleading as she kept moving forward, then angled left.
And through a doorway into a dining room that smelled of coffee and blood. The man who had been Jonah Devereaux slumped in the high-backed chair, his mouth open in stunned surprise, his eyes fixed and staring as blood poured from the wounds in his throat, his chest, shoulders. A woman in a white thong and bra, a thin, transparent robe, and thick black collar stood over him.
Blood splattered her and dripped from the knife she gripped.
She bared her teeth at Eve and raised the knife high as if to strike again.
“You need to drop the knife. We’re the police.” Eve didn’t shout it, but kept her eyes fixed on the woman’s. “We’re here to help you.”
“Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her.”
Eve lifted a hand toward a second woman, one in a black skin suit and collar. “We’re not here to hurt her. You need to stay back.”
“Please, you don’t understand.”
“Roarke.”
“We understand very well.” Roarke moved to the second woman.
“Put the knife down,” Eve repeated, “and step away from him.”
“I killed him.”
Had her eyes looked like that, Eve wondered, when she’d crouched over the body of Richard Troy, when she’d gripped the bloody knife she’d plunged into him again and again?
“Put the knife down,” she said yet again. “We need to get that collar off you.” And she lowered her weapon. “No one’s going to hurt you. Back off,” she ordered as one of her uniforms moved into another doorway. “Everyone, back off.”
“I won’t go back. I won’t.” Now the woman brought the knife to her own throat. “Death is better.”
“Stop. Look at me. Give me your name. What’s your name?”
“They took it when they took me.”
“Take it back. What’s your name?”
“I—my name is Amara,” she said as her eyes filled. “I am Amara Gharbi. I was. I am. I was.”
“If you use that knife on yourself, Amara, he wins. They took you from your home, from your family. Do you have family, Amara?”
“I did, in the before. But—”
“We’re going to help you get back, to your home, to your family.”