Chapter 7

SEVEN

DOMHNALL

“What?” Madison shouts, shaking her head. “No. No, that’s not a thing. Red! Red! I want out. I don’t care about the money. This isn’t fair!”

I tilt my head at her. “Isn’t it, though? You agreed to this game. You came into my territory. You approached my sister.” I take a step towards her, and she steps back, the chain attached to her collar rattling prettily.

“Your sister?” she gasps. “Moira’s your sister? Why do you have an accent and she doesn’t?”

I stare at her coldly. She’s such a good little actress. “Well you ensured we’d scurry out of Ireland while she was still a lass and I was seventeen. So cute, the amnesia shtick.” My own brogue gets thicker the more I talk to her. It happens like that sometimes when I think of times in the old country.

Her eyes narrow. “You do know me.” She takes a step forward before stopping in her tracks. “Who am I?”

I laugh and shake my head. “So many petty little games.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she shouts, then grabs at her collar and makes a run for the open door. I don’t move to stop her. The collar does that for me. It’s quite thick. She’s holding onto it, so it doesn’t yank her neck too hard when the chain catches and jerks her to a stop just before she reaches the threshold.

“You’re quite trapped, my dear. I’m not sure what you meant by coming here like this, but you’re mine now. And besides, it’s not my job to be fair. It’s my job to break you.”

She turns and looks back at me with wide, freaked-out eyes. “Who are you?”

I smile as dark power I’ve never fully unleashed, never once in my whole life, floods every cell of my being. I’ve dominated subs before, but even in the club where I get to be my truest self, I still have to be careful. But now all restraints are off. It’s never once been like this. I’m purely my feral self. My prey stands before me, trembling, with nowhere to run.

And it’s her . Beautiful Mads, with her bright, shining American smile. Gorgeous Mads, whose laughing eyes have haunted me for almost ten fucking years.

I’m afraid there’s not going to be anything sane about this. Caleb would not approve. And I don’t fucking care. “ You’ve signed your life away to me, Mads. And it’s only what you deserve. You stole everything from me the last time we met.”

I walk up until I’m face to face with her. She’s shaking with fear, and I should be disturbed with how hard it makes me. I’m not, though. I only get stiffer.

“Now it’s your turn to suffer, lovely Mads.”

She’s shaking and clutching her leather collar, eyes wide. “You keep calling me that. Like you know me. Do you? Tell me the truth!”

I shake my head in disgust. “It’s always games with you.”

“I’m not playing games! Moira can show you my brain scans. They’re at her apartment. I have amnesia from head trauma to my temporal lobe.” She taps the side of her head. “You can’t fake that.”

I laugh without pity. “Sure you can. Documents are the easiest thing in the world to fake. The woman I knew would have seen it as a great way to worm her way back into my life and wrap me around her little finger again.”

Her gaze wanders past me to the wall. “I guess I’m not her after all. I don’t think amnesia gives you a complete personality change.”

She appears so innocent. She makes for such believable prey, it’s almost easy to forget she’s the predator here. Almost.

I lean down and whisper in her ear, “You are her.”

She jerks backwards at the intimacy of my warm breath against her skin .

“How would you know?” she asks. “Maybe I just look like this woman you used to know.”

I bite back another incredulous laugh. “There’s a constellation of freckles on your inner thighs shaped like Cassiopeia. I licked them earlier. You’re Madison.”

She frowns, her lips making the shape of the name. Madison . Then she shakes her head as if it doesn’t ring any bells.

But finally, she looks down at her inner thigh. “Cassiopeia is the constellation shaped like a W ,” she whispers as if repeating a school lesson.

“I guess your amnesia’s clearing up.”

“No, it’s not like—” She stops and sucks in a long breath of air. “I never know what I’ll remember or not remember. I’ve no clue how or why it works the way it does.”

She’s still staring at the group of freckles on her thigh shaped like the Cassiopeia constellation. “You could’ve just seen that now and be lying to me that you knew it from before.” She looks up at me. “ I didn’t even know that was there.”

Fuck, she’s diabolical. If I didn’t know her for who she truly is, I might even fall for her little act. That was always the trouble with her. She’s so convincing that despite her father’s pure evil, I told myself she was an innocent. But that was the biggest lie of all.

I get right in her face. “I’m not the liar here.”

“No, you just lock people up in dungeons! I don’t know why I’m listening to anything you have to say. You’re taking advantage of someone with amnesia! Pretending you know me is so twisted and fucked up! You’re a sadistic cunt and this is ridiculous!” She grabs the chain of her collar and thrusts it towards me. “Let me out of this fucking thing!”

I laugh in her face. “Aww, poor Mads. You never did like facing the consequences of your actions.”

“My name is Brooke !”

“All right, Brooke. To be honest, Madison might have been a made-up name, too. I never knew anything about you until it was too late. You’re a shape-shifter and I know better than to trust any word you say.”

Her mouth drops open and she sputters.

“Don’t bother. Like you said. I’m a sadistic cunt. That part’s true enough. Then again, I’m only what you and your father molded me into.” I grin at her, and that dark thing inside me stretches in excited preparation. Pain . We’ll get to see her squirming in pain soon. So soon now. She’ll get what’s coming to her. My grin gets wider and I hold out my hands to gesture to the room full of floggers, canes, and whips. “Welcome to your karma.”

That’s when the doorbell rings and she starts to scream.