Chapter 22: Arrebatar - to cut with the whole arm (a heavy blow from the shoulder).

That night Sark panicked over something far more overwhelming than the mere discovery of some surveillance: he had feelings for James Dodgson, and he couldn't make them go away.

Alone, he leant forward over the bureau in his private rooms, elbows on it, head in hands, trembling. He repeatedly tugged at his hair.

What am I going to do?

Well whatever his feelings were … he collected himself, he didn't have feelings, and if he did then he determined they were not going to master him. Yes, he would smoothly rebuild a bridge between the two of them, yes he would manipulate the situation into a different relationship, but he would do it on his terms. His loss of control today had been an aberration, nothing more. He was not out of control. He would get it all back. He would have the structure he wanted, not anything she wanted.

She was his prisoner, not he hers.

It was beyond him to imagine any other way.

The morning broke. Somehow James had managed to recover herself from the events of the day before, entering the library using the walking cane she'd been provided, rigidly upright, radiating resentment, she refused to look at him.

Born in a swamp, Sark reflected tensely, and still one of nature's own aristocrats: a damned Duchess.

He had thoroughly intended to utilise all his seductiveness, urbane confidence, bullet-proof charm, all his manipulative wiles and ruthless game-playing, to manoeuvre her into bending to his perspective, but her demeanour wasn't giving him the chance. He couldn't gain entry.

Unapologetic – Mr. Sark didn't do true apologies – he stared at her in the silence of the library, determined that the weight of his gaze alone would force her to acknowledge him. It didn't.

Instead – her face a closed mask of stubborn resistance - she eased herself down into her chair, putting her stiff leg out before her, propping the cane at her side. She looked down and about her, looking for the shackles that were ordinarily there, like a passenger looking to buckle up into a faintly irksome but accustomed seatbelt. They were absent. Sark had ordered them to be removed in the night, hoping she would note it. If she noted it, he could detect no hint that she saw it as indicative of anything.

She opened up the laptop and got to work.

At Sark's instruction, all her clothes had been washed and dried. Her hair was clean but tangled. Angling for an opening Sark unobtrusively ordered a hairbrush for her, antique, heavy, silver - it was placed discreetly by her side by a lackey. James ignored the item.

Sark flicked glances at her, glints of hard, flashing blue that went un-noticed. Surrounded by minions as he stood across the room, he found he was unable to properly concentrate on issuing the final details of a job to be pulled that day – the electronic siphoning off of 30 million dollars from the business account of a multi-national company whose finances were so overly complicated that it would take them six months to even realise it was gone.

His lieutenants left.

He gazed at her hard in the silence, boring into her.

No reaction.

Looking at her, registering her glinting, frosty indifference to him, Sark felt his jaw grind slightly. He was a man who didn't do feelings. He paid no attention to his own, he wasn't going to pay court to anyone else's.

I know she knows I'm here. She's mine. I own her. She's cost me enough.

He walked with an even, measured tread over to her desk and stood before her, silent, head tilted, hands in pockets, staring down at her, daring her to continue to defy him even as he stood only inches away.

Miss Muffett and the spider.

His action evinced no response other than a slight pausing of her fingers over the keyboard. Sark stared down at her. As she continued to work and ignore him he leant a hand forward and silently closed the laptop screen onto the keypad, forcing her to move her hands out of the way as it shut, cutting off any excuse she might have for pretending he was not there.

She stiffened, staring in stubborn, mutinous silence at the patch of air where the screen had been.

Sark angled his head slightly, looking inward fractionally, considering. He was determined to breach a gap.

"I've noticed you never ask me for my first name."

She didn't look at him, just blank.

"Don't you want to know it?" he continued.

No response.

He folded his arms, still staring down at her.

"It's Julian."

No response.

He slowly leant into her. "I said - my name is Julian."

She stiffened further, exuding stubborn resentment even as she slightly drew into herself. "Yeah, whatever."

There was a pause. Sark's face hardened. He seemed to come to some conclusion. He leant even closer, slitheringly urbane, almost whispering. "If this behaviour keeps up James, you and I are going to have a problem."

"Why? What'ya gonna do, shoot me in the other leg?"

Sark's tight smile evinced no amusement. "James, I'm not going to apologise for yesterday. So let's just suck it up and move on, shall we?"

James blinked.

"What?" she queried. "Move on? It doesn't suit you to talk about what you did to me, so we're just going to 'move on'?" There was a pause. "I don't get my say, because you don't want me to have it?"

"Always knew you were a genius," he breathed. "Got it in one."

A still, few seconds of electric silence, and then … she went for him.

Snarling, hands out before her, clawing for his face, as much as her damaged leg would allow she leapt at him. Half-startled but laughing, he reared back from her and caught her hands and held them away from him as she tore and jerked in his grasp, trying to get free, snarling and spitting and crying, trying to get at him.

He was laughing in dark delight. It had been unplanned, but he had splintered her. He had snapped that arctic defence. He had the gap. All he had to do now was keep pushing until she snapped in two, until she exhausted herself and left herself with nothing. And then - when she was spent and emotionally finished, when she needed someone, anyone, to help her gather herself - he would pick up the crumpled tearstained pieces and re-assemble her in a new shape.

And she would be very grateful, and she would need him, because being in any shape at all was better than being in no shape.

It was the very technique he used when torturing someone.

In her attack she got nowhere near hurting him. Not even close. A damaged, untrained, academic versus Mr. Sark? It wasn't even a contest. It didn't even take strength for him to hold her off; although James was coming at him with everything she had, she didn't have anything in the first place. He knew it wouldn't matter even if she got lucky and somehow pushed him over, he'd land unhurt and roll to his feet. He knew how to take falls, he'd been taking them all his life.

"Excellent James." He didn't even bother trying to keep the exultant laugh out of his voice. "Now we're getting somewhere."

She gave quick little sobs, tears of fury and frustration, and managed to tear one of her hands away, balling her free hand into a fist and pounding it against his face.

Sark roared with laughter, batting back her flailing hand with his, not even bothering to catch it. She was just too lightweight.

With frustrated howling sobs she started kicking him instead.

Sark skipped his feet back.

"Nope, sorry, can't allow that."

He caught her round the waist and twisted her so that she had her back to him, pulling her in close, trapping her arms against her, picking her up, one forearm under her knees so that she was a struggling, curled-up ball against him and couldn't flail out.

"Comfy are we?" He laughed at her efforts, pushing her on, shoving her over the edge. He needed her to break completely so he could put the pieces back together in a shape that better fitted his grip.

She started trying to bite; sobbing howls of rage breaking from her.

"Whoah. That's the spirit!" His voice held a mocking laughter. "That's it James. Really lose it!" He brought his mouth close to her ear and hissed into her. "Because the sooner you accept the fact that you have no say here, the better for both of us."

She screamed in frustration and anger.

Her voice cracked, almost at the edge of flooding tears. "You think this is funny? You think I'm funny? You think it's fine to bully people who can't fight back and then laugh at them when they try to anyway?" She bucked, screaming. "You think you can treat me like dirt just because you're bigger than I am?"

With a titanic effort she wrenched, attempting to free herself. Sark gasped, trying to contain her, he hadn't expected her to be that strong. Hissing, he almost had to bend double to hold her. She was openly crying now, scalding tears of impotent rage even as she twisted furiously in his grasp.

This is it, she can't have much left now, soon she'll be spent and then I can kiss it all better and put us back together in a shape that suits.

Her tears didn't alarm him this time. He'd met these kinds of tears before. He understood them. This was that point in a torture where his victims wanted to tell him, because he'd stripped them down to a point where they wanted to please him - because they needed him. He had stripped away everything from them. He was all they had left. Their only contact to the world, their only remaining human connection. They needed his approval. They told him anything he wanted, because at that stage more than anything else they needed him to love them.

One more little push and she's done. Then I can put the pieces back together again.

He put his face close to hers, whispering, nuzzling, and gave that last little push. "Are you scared of me James?"

She sobbed, shaking her head wildly from side to side as if in denial of it, still trying to rip and tear.

"No?" he remarked lightly, still whispering. "Well you should be." He nuzzled his face into her again, eyes closed, sniffing, almost purring, "Because sometimes even I'm scared of me … "

Under the realisation that he was never going to give, she collapsed completely in an emotionally broken deadweight.

Sark nearly went himself, nearly toppling forward, bent double with the sudden weight of her collapse as she quietly cried. He slackened his grip now because he didn't need to hold her anymore, the fight was finished, now came the reconciliation. He let her feet fall to the floor so that she could stand, although she couldn't support her own weight and instead just hung forward in his arms, crying with hopeless, open-mouthed sobs.

That's it, she's spent, it's over.

Sark felt as exhausted as he ever had in his life. He realised it had taken almost as much out of him as it had taken out of her. Bent double, he lay the side of his face against her cheek, making shushing noises, and then grazed his lips along her neck. She was his now, there was no more fighting, he could do what he wanted now. He gently pushed a free hand into her hair, baring the vulnerable nape of her neck, pushing his face there, breathing in, smoothing his face against her, taking in her scent.

Here … this is where I shall first kiss her …

His lips brushed over her, quietly pressing against her, murmuring words.

"It's alright now James, now we can be - "

And then she did something no-one else had done to him. Ever. She found something extra within her. When it all seemed lost she found some desperate, inner strength. And then, she broke free. She wrenched with such force she tore a rip in his suit. Hissing, she snatched up the hairbrush and smashed it into the side of his head like a tennis player swinging a back hand.

Sark gasped in stunned, wide-eyed surprise, hand flying to his scalp where she'd cut him.

She faced him, expression contorted in rage, panting like she'd run a country mile, screwing her eyes shut and balling her fists, her voice a high-pitched scream of fury. "DON'T … TOUCH … ME!"

Sark blinked.

"WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?" she screamed at him, hysterical. "Look at you! You think you're so fucking cool? With your fucking fancy accent and your oh-so-British ways, floating through life, sneering to yourself and LOOKING DOWN AT THE REST OF US? Bullying people who are half your size? You COCKSUCKER!"

This was not part of Sark's game plan, he had not been expecting this.

"You think I want to be here?" she screamed on. "Trapped with a vicious killer who'll never be able to change or be any better? You think I feel any CONNECTION to you?" Facing him, she was almost bent double she was screaming her rage out so hard. "I HATE YOU! - I HATE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO DIE!"

Sark's stunned face was blank with disbelief.

She … what? She wants me to die? She thinks I can't change?

For the first time ever, Mr. Julian Sark had just lost at his favourite game.

She hurled the hairbrush at him, and then the pens and pencils off the desk.

With an irregular heartbeat thumping angrily in his chest he realised he had two choices: hit her or leave. He stalked out. His vision was almost whited-out by wrath. Her words rang in his ears. Words he would not listen to, words he would not have, words he could not afford to believe were true.

SHE'S WRONG!

He went to his private rooms. Changing his ripped clothes, he practically tore them off. But all he could do was swap them for ones more or less identical: just another of his trade-mark Mr. Sark suits. Angry, livid, he took an abrupt one-second check of his reflection in a mirror and was hit by a rare flash of introspection as he saw his essentially unchanged appearance.

That's you all over Sarkey. Try to change all you like, you'll always be Mr. Sark.

Startled, panicked, he slammed the door on the thought. He forced himself back into the straight-jacket of his persona, the urbane and composed Mr. Sark, the infamous Mr. Sark who never lost control. He stalked out of his rooms, shoving himself back into shape; there was no sign whatsoever that he had just been in any kind of conflict, either internal or external. He was told he had a visitor, a business associate who was waiting for him with James in the library. Striding relentlessly, Sark swept in with a controlled anger and saw who was standing there: someone small, wiry, unsavoury and oozing a smooth, sleazy malevolence.

Arvin Sloane.

He turned to face Sark with a typically false display of nauseating, congenial, almost avuncular concern. It never did hide the threat he posed.

"I'm here to check up on things Mr. Sark."