Page 25 of Savage Surrender

I stood barefoot in that wrecked kitchen, going soft as butter beside the stove for four men who were still lying to me. They’re trying to shield me. I still don’t appreciate it. Yes, maybe I have a temper, but I want to know the moves. Their secrets are like peas at the bottom of a hundred stacked mattresses. Every time I settle, I feel it.

“Ms. Quinn. Suck in, please.”

A hand brushes my hair aside while another works the zipper up my spine. The dress seals around me inch by inch until breathing becomes a negotiation.

Baby blue.

Not merely close to the dress I wore to the graduation party at Montgomery’s pool five years ago. The exact shade. The same impossible blue from the girl who believed the worst thing that could happen to her was being knocked into the pool on the most important night of her life.

I can put the images side by side. A before and after.

“Lift your chin.”

Blondie sets her tablet aside and draws a velvet pouch from inside her suit jacket. Diamonds spill into her palm. Too many of them, ornate and old. It looks like the kind of thing you’d see on a dead woman in a portrait above a fireplace.

Then it closes around my neck.

Heavy. Cold as creek water in January. It settles against my throat exactly where a collar would sit, metal and stones pressing into the tender places above my bond marks.

My fingers go to it at once. I want the weight off. I want whatever it means gone.

“Don’t remove it.” Her tone goes cool and firm, the voice adults use on other people’s badly behaved children. “It does not leave your neck tonight.”

My hair, restored for him. My skin, polished for him. My body, calibrated by him before I could walk. Why would my throat belong to me?

They turn me toward a full-length mirror and arrange themselves behind me like artists inspecting a painting.

The woman in the glass cannot be me.

She looks like a debutante. Someone porcelain and well-rested and innocent of every feral thought in my head. Her hair is swept into an intricate updo, with soft pieces at the temples designed to suggest sweetness. Her face is all muted pink. Diamonds at her throat. Baby blue to her ankles. Four bond marks powdered down until they are little more than shadows.

His daughter.

His creation.

I want to ruin her.

I want to drag her backward through a hedge. Split her lip. Smear the pink from her mouth and pull every pin from her hair with someone’s fist tangled in it. I want her wrecked and panting and recognizable again.

Mine again.

“You’re ready. You may meet your partners in the entryway.”

One of the women kneels with my heels. I step back before she can catch my ankle and scoop the shoes from the floor by their straps.

“I’ve got it. Thanks.”

She retreats without argument.

One thing.

They took six hours and every inch of skin. I hook the straps tighter around my fingers and walk past all five of them barefoot.

I find them exactly where I’ve been told they’ll be.

Four alphas in black tuxedos.

Oh.