Chapter 264: Spoiled by Design
When they separated, both of them looked satisfied.
Serena knew why Elias looked that way. In the life she had given him, her kiss was comfort, reward, proof that she still loved him. Of course he would smile. Of course he would look dazed and pleased, as if the world had returned to its proper place the instant she bent down for him.
Her own satisfaction came from a darker place.
She had hidden everything. The hypnosis. The kidnapping. The false childhood. The way she had cut away his past and replaced it with one where he belonged to her before he belonged to anyone else. Elias, the one being controlled, knew none of it. He sat there trusting her completely, smiling at her with damp lips and bright eyes, unaware of the hand around the core of his life.
That ignorance fed something in Serena that she rarely allowed herself to name.
