But instead of doing any of those things, she had simply attended her classes like nothing was out of the ordinary. Melted into his arms the moment he touched her. Had lunch with him under the sun like they were merely out sailing for a date.
It all felt too fucking normal, and that was why it had also felt too fucking wrong.
In the first few years that followed the cult's dismantlement, Raaf had felt hapless as he witnessed those he knew from Ypeíko start dying one by one like shooting targets falling off a shelf.
These were kids he had grown up with, and when he had gotten a little older, he had done his best to protect. Raaf had thought he was saving his friends by bringing Ypeíko down, but in the first year alone he had found himself attending the funerals of six of his friends. Two boys and four girls, all of them struggling to find a place for themselves in the new world they had been shoved to. All of them made to feel that they would never fit in, and so they had decided to kill themselves to end their misery.
By the second year, fourteen more of his friends had died. Four-fucking-teen. Over a dozen lives that could have been saved, if the people around them had not made them feel that they needed to be normal in order to be loved.
The world had made all of them believe that there could be no redemption for monsters who weren't able to excise the darkness out of them, and for a very long time, Raaf had believed this, too. He had believed there always had to be a choice...until her.
His Sara now had spent days in his possession, and she had seen both the man and the monster in him. His Sara, more than anyone else, had the right to demand that he destroy the monster inside him. But she never had. Even though she had never lived in his kind of darkness, his Sara, simply by being herself, debunked everything he once thought was true—-
And in the process, it had left Raaf tasting fear and uncertainty for the first time in years. She had, for better or for worse, made the monster feel human again, and it was precisely because of that he found himself testing her at every turn.
Time and time again, he would show her more of his darkness, and with each instance, hope and despair would battle within him as he waited for her to hate him for good...but she never did.
Time and time again, he would tempt her with a chance to escape, but she never did.
His Sara, without even trying, was pushing him to believe they could have a future, and as if that was not bad enough...
His remote access to her laptop allowed him to watch everything she was doing without leaving his seat, and right now, instead of listening to her history professor's admittedly dull-sounding lecture, she was typing out a list of terms on her notepad that had nothing to do with any of her classes.
Cold storage for what?
Halving - what?
Exchange - what? when? who?
She would never have any reason to write such things if she hadn't been eavesdropping on his calls, and since he could easily see why such words had obviously led her to the wrong conclusions...
Why the fuck was she still with him?
It really was a blessing he had not kidnapped her for her brains because it was becoming increasingly apparent his Sara had none to speak of. She should have run for the fucking woods the moment she had her suspicions, but here she was in front of him, obediently logging out of Zoom when her last class ended, and not once had she tried to tell anyone she had been kidnapped.
School might be over, but it was not too late to have her learn the most important lesson of all. And since example was supposedly the best teacher in life...
"Are you all done with classes, my dove?"
The eyes were supposedly windows to a person's soul, but where Sara was concerned, her eyes were her soul, and Raaf did not know whether to be amused or worried at how her eyes were telling him more than what her meek little nod indicated.
How does he know I'm done with classes?
Is he spying on me again?
But how is he doing it?
He thought about it for a second. Offended, he decided in the end. The questions he read in her Bambi eyes absolutely offended him because it showed how little appreciation she had of his skills. He had learned about her entire life with just a few clicks of his mouse, and he also knew everything there was to know about every person who worked in and went to her high school, in case the need to twist a couple of arms ever arose. Sara knew who he fucking was. What his background was. But here his adorably cute and frighteningly stupid idiot of a woman was, all too obviously wondering how it was that he had known the exact moment the last of her classes had ended?