And even if I could scare her into silence, I have no idea how long that silence would hold. She might tell a friend one day. A boyfriend, even. It’s strange how quickly my stomach sours at the thought of her with another man.
I don’t fucking like it.
Grimacing, I ring up Svetlana. She’s one of the live-in maids who’s paid three times as much as the others because she’s on call twenty-four-seven and she understands the meaning of discretion. It doesn’t take her long to find me in the foyer.
“Sir?” She’s still got sleep creases on the side of her face, but her eyes are bright and observant.
“I need you to change the linens in the basement. And while you’re down there, tidy it up a bit, will you?”
She seems slightly confused but she doesn’t ask questions. “Of course, sir. Right away.”
“Oh, and make sure the household staff know that no one is allowed down into the basement after you’re done cleaning in there.”
She frowns. “Do you mean no one except Master Lev, sir?”
“I mean no one including Master Lev.”
She blinks just once at the unexpected instructions, but she doesn’t say anything else before nodding and heading towards the basement. Meanwhile, I go back up to my room. Alyssa is still sleeping soundly, completely unaware that she’s about to become a much more permanent fixture here than she ever could have guessed.
She’s going to get very feisty, very quickly when she figures that out.
It’s too tempting to think of crawling into bed with her, letting my hands run over her body. She felt so good earlier, squirming beneath my fingers and clenching around my cock. But that would definitely violate my “no repeats” rule.
Of course, it would also prove her wrong—which is a justification that I like a little too much.
I should be thinking about moving her somewhere more removed. Fuck knows I have safehouses aplenty across the city, the country, the globe. And with Lev in the house, stashing Alyssa here is far too risky.
But I can’t abide the thought of having her anywhere else.
I tell myself it’s because I need to keep an eye on her, but the truth is not that simple. I just scratched the surface tonight. I’ve yet to figure this woman out and until I do, her blunder has given me the perfect excuse to keep her under my thumb.
She won’t be staying forever. Nor do I want her to. But I can’t escape the fact that I want her here now.
If only so that I can split her open further and figure out how she works.
11
ALYSSA
Why do I feel like I’m drowning?
It takes a minute before I register that my eyes are still closed and I’m caught between the sleeping world and the waking one.
“Ugh,” I moan as I try to pry my eyelids open. I feel like I’ve been asleep for centuries, but they’re still stubbornly heavy.
Next question: why is it so wet?
I peel my face from a mattress that feels like cotton candy and discover the embarrassingly large circle of drool I’ve been sleeping on. Well, that explains the wetness. I tuck a pillow over the puddle and straighten up.
Why is it so dark? Did I forget to draw my bedroom curtains last night? Maybe that’s why it feels so stuffy in here…
Wait.
Where is “here,” exactly?
The realization that I’m not actually in my own bed hits me like a ton of bricks to the head. I’m not in my own room.
So… where the hell am I?
I jerk out of the bed and look around, suddenly wide awake. I’m in a huge space with high, arching ceilings and yet I feel extremely claustrophobic. It doesn’t take much to figure out why. There are no windows in this room. The only door looks like something out of a medieval castle and, try as I might, I can’t seem to open it.
Where. Am. I?
And then it comes back to me like a slideshow, one image after another in quick succession.
The package.
The fence.
Garfield.
Uri Bugrov.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
The slideshow doesn’t let up. My head is spinning and I’m dangerously close to falling but the memories are relentless.
Dinner. Sex on the table. A finger in my freezer. Uri again. The breakin. Scallops and an inappropriate apron.
Uri fucking Bugrov.
I look up at the ceiling as goosebumps erupt all over my body. Am I still in his mansion? Am I locked away somewhere deep and cold and dark so that no one can find me?
The finger. He knows I have his package. He knows I opened it. He—
The breakin. The cop from last night. Alyssa! You fucking idiot! It was all a ruse, a stupidly simple plan to get me out of the house so that he could search it. Of course. Why the hell hadn’t I seen it before?