Chapter Forty-One

Safiya

S tanding at the slider doors that opened to a private balcony, I watched as the yacht that was longer than anything I knew to compare it to expertly pulled into a bay and maneuvered until it was almost parallel with the shoreline.

Driving rain pelted the sleek wooden decks, and the starless sky was now faintly illuminated by a line of lights on shore, just past the breaking waves. It occurred to me that I did not know where we were. I had heard what the man from the yacht had said, but I did not know geography hardly at all. Virgin Gorda and Taylor's Bay with its choppy waves and stormy sky could have been anywhere in any country.

I had not even known where I had been taken after those men in the cabin drugged me.

It did not even occur to me to ask Grayson.

That realization alone should have been more alarming than the humiliating, destructive churning in my stomach, let alone the aching soreness that was grating across every bone, muscle, and nerve in my body, but it was not.

Everything, absolutely everything that had happened was narrowing my focus down to a single movement, a mere breath's worth of an action, and I was losing all perspective.

I had already lost it.

My fist in his shirt, his restraining grip around my wrist, then the dominant shove of the last scraps of my dignity as he pushed my arm down, released me, and watched my fall from grace.

Except I had never had grace—not with this man.

And I had never had choice.

Not when he first took me, and not where this yacht was mooring.

"We need to move out."

My breath hitched and my nerves jumped at the sound of his dominant command behind me. Then my thoughts bled out. "I did not hear you come back."

Before I could turn around, his body heat and the inescapable winter rain scent that always clung to his skin no matter what he wore or where we were, landed on my back and warmed my traitorous soul as he spoke from just behind me. "I always come back for you, Safiya."

I wanted to argue.

I wanted to say that I did not care if he came or went or I never saw him again, but I could not say any of it.

Because the other part of me, the desperate young girl who had pleaded with an honorable American military man to save her mother when he himself was fighting against all odds—that girl was clawing at my insides. Frantic to get out, she wanted to beg him. Drop to her knees and supplicate, beg him.

One touch.

Not just how he had touched my flesh and bones in the bath, but consume me like a man consumes a woman he would die for. I wanted him to show me that because then I could hold on to his words.

With me. Die together. The most beautiful woman. I always come back for you.

Then I would feel justified.

I would feel like I mattered.

But this? Floating on an impossible dream of a yacht, wearing designer clothes, pretending it was not taking every ounce of effort not to crumble into tiny, inconsequential pieces as I barely stood upright—it was killing me.

Turning around and stepping past him, forcing myself not to meet his exacting gaze, I focused on the door of the suite. Then I did what I had been doing since that day I first saw the ocean. I put one foot in front of the other in the life I did have.

"Safiya, stop."

I told myself not to. I truly did. But my body and my mind had not been in sync for eight years.

Halting until I was no longer moving by momentum alone, I held my spine as straight as I could after the bone-jarring landing of that plane, and I did what I had always done with this ghost of a man. I waited.

But nothing happened.

No heat at my back, no more commands, no more punishingly tender brushes of my hair over my shoulder, no harsh words humiliating me. It was as if he had disappeared, and I was frozen.

Until I was not.

Silently coming up behind me again, this time dropping only to a squat, he placed a pair of sandals at my feet. Then he glanced up. "Wrong size, but step in."

I looked down at expensive designer sandals with supple leather straps, a gold insignia, and a suede footbed.

They were too small, but I slid my feet in anyway.

His warm palm landed on the back of my leg as his long fingers wrapped around my ankle. "Good?"

Raised flesh swarmed up my body, over my shoulders, and across my neck. "Fine." Would I ever be fine after this?

His stare absolute, his expression an immovable object in a world that never stood still, he did not stand up. "Do we need to talk?"

"No."

His thumb stroked my ankle with the deliberate pressure I had come to expect when he wanted something from me. "I think we do."

"You said we have to leave."

"I said move out," he corrected, still squatted, still stroking my skin. "And we do, but the second we leave this cabin, we'll have company."

"Okay." I did not know what else to say.

"You're anything but." Releasing his grip on my foot, standing to his full height in one fluid movement of sheer power and strength, he gripped my chin and tilted my head up until my gaze met his. Then he spoke down to me. "Do you understand why I said what I did?"

An entirely new level of indignity struck me like that plane had struck the water. "Yes."

The same thumb that had caressed my ankle coasted over my cheek with a punishingly gentle touch. "Your expression says otherwise."

"There are people waiting on us."

"Let them."

I said nothing. I was not fool enough to believe that I had any say.

The caress came again, but his voice, his eyes, they did not soften. "I know what you want from me."

My humiliation grew to a depth and breadth that he could not possibly understand. "If I am not needed for this conversation, then I do not desire to have it."

"Do you understand the difference between need and want, Safiya?"

Why did he think I had studied literature? Why did he think I had spent all those years teaching myself to be well-read in his language? It was not about a piece of paper with a degree that deemed me educated. It was not even about the vastness of the remarkable literature that mimicked the immensity of the ocean.

It was about him.

I may have been ignorant and inexperienced when he had brought me to this country, but I had never been stupid.

Of course I understood the difference between need and want.

I had wanted to fit into his life, but I had needed to be prepared for when I no longer would. And that was what I had done, what I had told myself I was doing every time I saved some of the grocery money or researched employment opportunities when he had expressly forbidden me from working.

I had looked, and I had saved. I had opened my own bank account separate from the one he had given me.

I had enough for a deposit on a small apartment. I knew what I was capable of, and I had quietly, carefully carved a small path forward. But most importantly, I had been protecting myself. Not only my uncertain future, but the promise I had made the night my anne had been killed, the night I had been taken and locked away in the dark, windowless hell with no escape.

I had promised myself I would never be that vulnerable again.

But I would also not settle myself so low to the luxury carpet beneath his feet by explaining or defending myself. I would not stumble in these borrowed sandals. And I would not give him an answer that he could minimize with his cryptic retorts or aggressive dominance.

He could stand there and reject me.

He could use his now cool and collected tone.

He could insult my intelligence.

And he could run his hands all over my flesh and throw out his enigmatic words like sun-kissed ripe fruit on a low branch.

But I would not reach for it.

I would not reach for him. Not ever again because I was done being humiliated.

He could keep his need and his want .

I was keeping my silence.

He inhaled, and for the briefest of moments, he looked every bit as shattered as I felt. Then just as fast, his expression locked, and he reached for a designer leather tote bag on a side table and handed it to me. "Here."

I glanced inside.

The bloodstained, ruined sundress he had bought me that first month was neatly folded and carefully tucked into the bottom of the bag.

My head, my heart, my vision, they all fluttered.

But then the rising flutters became a downward spiral, and I went there.

Was leaving my dress on this yacht more appalling than the price of the designer tote he had just stolen? Had he stolen it? Was the owner of the yacht another one of his wives? Did he buy her the bag? Was I merely being ferried away so he could return to her?

You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on, Safiya Savas.

Was I overreacting—to everything?

Without comment, I took the dress that I had coveted and loved more than I had missed my childhood. A dress that used to represent the foolish hope of a teenage girl taken from everything she had ever known and deposited like a fabled, imaginary princess into a storybook of enchanted lies.

Except there was no castle or knight in my version. There was a mansion on the beach and an impossibly handsome, completely unattainable, dominant Navy SEAL who was so reticent that he redefined taciturn.

A SEAL who had bought me a sundress.

A firm hand landed on the small of my back. "Tender's waiting."

I shouldered the leather tote bag.