The Blood Debt

Chapter 16

Ayla

I'm hugging the shirt I'm wearing so tightly against my waist, that when Roman takes my arms and places them by my sides, they feel stiff with tension.

I can't bring myself to look at him as he peels back my shirt. It's close to four o'clock in the morning and I'm exhausted. I feel like Roman's peeled back all my layers and left me exposed in more ways than the obvious. I've shared a part of myself with Roman that's deeply personal, and it makes me feel as though he's extracted the essence of my will, and he's holding it at ransom. I can't bring myself to submit to him, nor can I fight him anymore. It feels like I'm in purgatory.

The past few weeks have drained any fight I have left in me. They've made me realise that I can't keep doing this, not when he holds the advantage. Moving forward I realise that this  gives me two options: I can continue to live my life in misery or I can get something in return for my misery.

It sounds easy enough in my head. It's just sex I tell myself as I wait for him that night. It's a simple transaction between two adults. People do it all the time, but this is Roman we're talking about and he finds a way to complicate the simple, because nothing is ever simple with Roman. He demands more. He tells me he wants this to be more than just an arrangement, and when he tells me that he's wanted me from the first day he set eyes on me, it's a revelation that makes me Ayla no-Moore in a heartbeat.

His admission complicates things. It's not enough to subdue my anger toward him, I don't think anything can do that, but it goes a long way in soothing years of insecurity and self-doubt, and while I know that things have changed between us over the past year, they haven't progressed to the point where I'd contemplate having a real relationship with him, yet that's exactly what he proposes.

Am I flattered that he feels this way about me?

Of course I am.

I'm the girl whose only boyfriend labelled her a frigid bitch. I'm still a virgin at twenty-one and someone who's struggled with self-belief her entire life. I'm the girl who was known to the entire Lions team as 'No-Moore'. I can't imagine a woman not being flattered by Roman's attention. He's six-feet-four-inches of walking sex appeal. How I feel about him personally is one thing, but that doesn't make me blind; I see how women look at him. I see the way he turns heads when he walks into a room. I even see his charm, that charisma that has so many fooled until they do something that triggers his switch, that changes him from man to monster in the blink of an eye. So when he peels off my shirt and I stand in front of him like I have no man before him, I don't know if I can give him all of myself like he asks, but I do know I can't keep living like this. He's going to break me if something doesn't change, and despite everything that's happened, everything he tells me, I still hold onto the hope that one day, if I can survive Roman Berisha long enough, my life will be as it once was and I'll stop being Vengeance and become Ayla Moore again.

His patience and caution in the early hours of that morning come as a surprise. I expect that he'll be as he always is, hard and unyielding - but he surprises me. It's hard to reconcile the man I've come to know with this one - the one whose hands work over my body leaving no place untouched like he's worshipping me. I realise it's not just sex we're having, it's an intimacy that penetrates deeper than that - it's a connection that pierces something deep within my soul.

He manages to bring out of me something I've struggled with my entire life - he makes me feel uninhabited in my own skin; he liberates me from the insecurities that have plagued me for as long as I can remember, and as the morning sun begins to creep into the apartment, he manages to thaw that nervousness that had my limbs frozen solid only a few hours earlier.