Page 19

Alora

I sucked in a deep breath, and my eyes snapped open as I tried to wipe away the confusion. My arms were around Greyson’s neck as he finished lowering me into a tub of warm water that felt glorious surrounding my aching body.

“Hi there, Doll. How are you feeling?” He lifted my cuffed wrists over his head, and I eased back into the tub. I sucked in a sharp breath as the water hit the wound on my hand. Before we left the crypt, Greyson had sterilized it and put some sort of white tape he said would help it heal, then wrapped it up.

“I’m not sure, but saying I feel like I’ve been run over by a train wouldn’t do it enough credit,” I said, wincing as I stretched out my legs. There wasn’t a single part of my body that didn’t have scrapes or bruises. Going a round with Mike Tyson would’ve been easier. He would’ve just knocked my ass out, but this…this was a slow and deliberate torture designed to wear me down.

“I’ll take care of some of that right now,” he said as he stripped off his t-shirt and tossed it aside, and I wanted to cry at the thought of having sex again already. Greyson laughed. “I’m not fucking you. I just don’t want to get my shirt soaked.” I slumped against the tub.

“Thank you,” I said, my eyes fluttering closed. He could kill me right now, and I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop him. A soft moan left my lips as he used a washcloth and slid it over my stomach. His hand was efficient and yet tender. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“This?” Opening my eyes, I searched his face as he lifted my leg from the water and added more soap before gently running the cloth up and down. The red paint dripped off and discolored the water. “You just chopped a man up, stabbed me, and now here you are playing nurse. Why haven’t you killed me?” My bottom lip trembled, but I was too fucking tired to cry. “Just tell me what you want with me.”

Greyson looked at me and then resumed his work but didn’t say anything. “Tell me about the accident that killed your sister and the other girl.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to answer my question?” He glanced at me, and there was a command in the simple act that was as loud as if he’d screamed in my ear. “Fine, don’t tell me. I’ve resigned myself to dying. So whether it happened at the bridge or you drown me in this tub, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

He froze, his lip lifting as he growled at me. Like a great cat, he slunk into the tub, his body blanketing mine. His muscles flexed as he caged me with his arms and legs. Even though my body was battered and worn out, it instantly heated up.

“Is that what you still want? To die,” he asked, his voice rumbling with the aggression rolling off him. I couldn’t form words as he bit my lower lip and ran his tongue along it. When he let go, he had red droplets on his tongue. Only then did I feel the sting of the cut he’d made. “No answer? Do you even know? Back in the crypt, you said you didn’t, so what is the truth, Doll?”

“I don’t want to be scared anymore. I’ve spent my entire life angry or scared or in pain…I’m tired. I’m tired of the demons in my head. I’m tired of fighting the addiction that claws at my soul. Most of all, I’m tired of running from ghosts,” I answered, spewing the reality that had been sitting on my chest every day for as long as I could remember.

“Kiss me.” Leaning in slowly, I gave him a soft peck on his lips, and he lifted a brow at me. “That’s not a kiss. Kiss me and show me the emotion you’re talking about. Make me understand. Give me your pain, Doll.” He licked at my lips. The act was sensual in the depravity of this moment. “Let me rip it from your body and feast on it.”

The water trickled from my arms as I lifted them and waited to see if he’d stop me as I wrapped my cuffed wrists around his neck. Greyson never budged, his eyes boring into the darkest places of my soul as lines of red paint trailed along my skin like thin rivers of blood.

I kissed him again, the softness of his lips comforting me as much as they destroyed the fabric of who I was. Closing my eyes, I deepened the kiss, opening for him and letting the world explode around me. A desire that I’d never be able to explain welled up and took control. The part of me that tried to tell me this was a terrible idea shut down and let Greyson, in all of his decadence, carry me away.

Even as he kissed me until we were completely submerged under the water and I could no longer breathe, I didn’t care. His hand kept me pressed down to the bottom of the tub, and my instinct was to panic and thrash, but I gave myself over to what he wanted to do as he broke the kiss. Everything was dark and quiet, a bubble slipping from my lips as I envisioned what it would be like to be free. Would I be whisked away on a stream of insanity, sprout wings, and fly away, or would there be silence?

Instead of killing me, his lips touched mine again, and as I opened my mouth, he breathed air into my lungs, extinguishing the burn filling my chest. He did it again and again until the only thing keeping me alive was the grace of his lips and his choice to feed me air. As he let go again, I held him to me and wouldn’t let him up as our tongues battled. I wanted him for all the reasons that I was terrified of him.

Blackness was on the periphery of my mind as my body screamed for air, but I didn’t let up and silently begged him to fix me or kill me. I was nothing more than a broken thing in his grasp, a cracked doll with snapped strings. He could either lay me down or repair the damage and force me to dance one last time.

Rising out of the water, Greyson broke the kiss, and we both gasped. Our foreheads touched, the red water running down our faces as we stared into each other’s eyes. I’d laid bare what was in my soul, letting him see the truth of my dark heart and the pain that was wrapped around it as tightly as twisted vines.

Closing my eyes, I allowed the emotion I’d buried deep inside of me to break free, and the tears came as I purposely hauled the memories up.

“I was seventeen when it happened, but I’d felt lost long before that night. I hardly remembered my father and my mother made sure she reminded me that he had left because he didn’t love us enough to stay. My best friend had been abused, left for dead, and refused to speak to me. My boyfriend took my virginity and then left me for someone else. I’ll be honest. I was angry, feeling alone, and wasn’t in a good headspace when my sister called needing a ride. In fact, I was annoyed as hell that she snuck out, and I had to pick her up.” Opening my eyes, Greyson hadn’t budged. I couldn’t tell if he’d even taken a breath he held so still.

“I had an annoying confrontation with my ex as I left the party. Then I had to steal my mother’s car while she was at work because I didn’t have one. Before you ask why she didn’t just call my mom, Evie said that it was because she and her friend didn’t want to get into trouble. My mom would have had to tell Tammy’s parents about them sneaking out and ending up at a college party. It wasn’t until after I picked her up that I found out Evie was interested in one of the guys at the party. He basically lured her there. I don’t know if he knew what his older brother was going to do, but the asshole forced himself on her. She was embarrassed and didn’t want anyone to know, but the moment I looked at her face, I knew. Something was off. When she told me, all I saw was red, and my mind snapped. I drove back to the party and attacked his truck with a tire iron.”

Greyson’s lip turned up into a lopsided grin. “Is that all you attacked?”

“No. He came out of the house. He was drunk and came at me. I got in a couple of good hits, but my mistake was not killing him. It was a property out in the country, so we were a ways outside of the city. He caught up to us about halfway back and rammed the back of the car.” I sucked in a slow breath compelling myself to continue. “My mom’s car was no match for the truck. I tried to get away. I really did. The car was going as fast as it could. He hit us again and…I can still hear the tearing of the metal and the screams like I never left the car. It’s still flipping all this time later. When I came to, the…the…fuck. The tire iron was through my sister’s chest, and her friend had flown through the windshield.”

My body began to shake, and Greyson smoothed my hair back before kissing my forehead.

“I had to sit there staring at my sister, at what I’d done, until the firefighters arrived and extracted us from the car. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lifeless body. She was the only good thing in my life. We fought all the time, but she was my ride-or-die, and I killed her. I killed her. I killed my baby sister, and I can never make that okay. I can never take it back. I would trade my life for hers. I begged God to let me be the one, but no one listened.”

He kissed my trembling lips. “I’ve got you now, Doll. Let it out.”

Even knowing I shouldn’t, I clung to Greyson and sobbed. Pain that had been long suppressed consumed me as my body shook with the effort. Picking me up, he sat down in the tub and cradled me to his chest. He was a serial killer, someone who couldn’t be trusted. Greyson was holding me prisoner, and yet, I’d never felt safer.

“The reports said you were drunk,” he said when I finally fell silent and just let him hold me in his arms.

A frustrated growl left my lips. “No. I only had half a beer over two hours at the party, which wouldn’t have made me drunk. That was before I walked thirty minutes to get my mother’s car and stopped at the store to get a bag of chips and a bottle of water before driving outside of the city to get my sister. I was stone-cold sober.”

“Why is there no mention of the truck,” he asked, and I liked that he didn’t say the words like I was lying. He only wanted the facts.

“Because Keith Cadieux, the douche bag, was a star quarterback, and miraculously the truck was never found. I don’t know what happened to it. I was in the hospital and too busy grieving and getting arrested. They never tested the paint damage on the back of the car. When I got into court, every witness brought in from the party said that I was unstable and seemed impaired. They all remembered me smashing the truck and beating Keith but had amnesia as to what happened after that. No one believed me, and no one opened their goddamn mouth that the asshole left the party. Not one. Not even my mother believed me because ‘I’d always been a bad apple.’”

“Do you know what came of this, Keith?”

I shook my head no. “I never looked. It would only make me feel more enraged and trapped while I sat in a cell. I deserved it anyway. I should’ve just called the cops or gone back by myself, but I chose the path I did, and I’ve paid for it every single day since.”

“I’m going to assume that’s why you turned to alcohol?”

“Let’s just say it was the tip of the iceberg of reasons.”

We sat there in silence for a long time as he stroked my arm and kept the goosebumps and shivers at bay.

“I believe you,” he said.

With those three simple words, Greyson painted over a crack in my heart as easily as he’d painted my body.