Free Master's Flame by Annabel Joseph Page B

should know,” she said, her voice rising to a shriek. “You insulted me today. Rejected me.”
    “Oh, this is my fault?” He bit back sharper words, words that would have maimed her, words he would have regretted. The idea of her risking her life because of something he’d done to her? God, it flayed him raw, and he didn’t deal well with that feeling. He focused instead on the bleeding cuts on her back. He would have to take her home and treat them, not because he blamed himself for them, but because he didn’t trust her to do it herself. “Do you think before you do anything?” he said, giving her a sharp shake. “What did you imagine you’d accomplish with that scene?”
    He wanted to shy away from the pain in her eyes. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want any of this. “Don’t look at me that way,” she screamed. “Don’t touch me. I hate you. I hate you, and you don’t care about me anyway! What I do outside of work is none of your business.”
    “When you try to kill yourself in my goddamn dungeon, it becomes my business,” he said, wrapping a blanket around her. “Now shut your fucking mouth before I’m tempted to whip you some more.”
    *** *** ***
     
    Valentina lay nude, face-down, on a poster bed in a half-lit, white-painted room. An identical bed stood in stark relief against the opposite wall. Besides the four tall posts making up the frames, both beds were enclosed on three sides—and on top—with iron bars.
    Cages. These weren’t beds. They were cages.
    No, they were beds. She was going mad, even madder than she’d been when she’d incited Jake and Damon into scening with her in the back room. She’d been hurting and she’d wanted to hurt worse, and now she hurt so bad she almost couldn’t draw breath. She felt empty, like some vast hole had opened inside her that could never be healed. She hated when she got this way, when she did dangerous, impulsive things because she didn’t have a name for the emotions inside her, or any way to control them as they swarmed in her brain.
    Look
, Mr. Lemaitre had thundered as he held her in his bathroom.
Look what you’ve done to yourself.
Horrible, garish cuts and welts covered her from her shoulders to her ass and hips, and even to the backs of her thighs. It hadn’t seemed like so much in the moment but now it looked awful. There would be bruises, he said, and then he’d said a lot of other very cruel things. He’d stood with her in his white-granite guest room shower and washed off the blood, and lectured her until tears mixed with the water coursing down her cheeks.
You don’t even know them
, he’d said.
They are nothing to you. How can you give this much of yourself to them?
    He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that she’d been giving herself to
him
, not them.
    But that only went to show how crazy she was. She’d wanted his attention, perhaps his regret. Even his anger. Well, she had that. She wanted Mr. Lemaitre but he didn’t want her, and she didn’t know how to process that, how to get over it.
    She winced as his fingertips salved a cut on her shoulder blade, and knew she needed to say true things to him. It was the only way to reverse this horrible slide and make up for her mistakes, so when the first truth came to her she spoke it aloud in the oppressive silence. “If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do it again.”
    He moved from her shoulder blade to a cut on the tender skin near her spine. “I’m glad to hear that.” His voice was tight, dripping with something like sarcasm, but not the roar of disapproval it had been before.
    “It’s just... My brain... When I start to feel—”
    “If you are going to make more excuses, save them.”
    She fell silent, biting her lip. “
Monsieur
—”
    “I don’t want to hear excuses. I need to understand what’s driving this behavior of yours. I need to know how to stop it, because it can’t continue.”
    “My grandmother said I had
il Diavolo
inside