Page 33 of Broken by my Bully (Lessons in Cruelty Dark Academia #1)

“Kai!” My voice is hardly loud enough to carry past the tree line, but I still try to reason with him.

Or maybe I’m just antagonizing him so he’ll end it faster.

God knows, I haven’t always been Haven ‘Shake-It-Off’ Lee. In my darkest days, those where I slunk home at midnight only to hear my uncle’s bed creak as he got up to greet me, those nights I prayed for death.

I don’t know what the hell I want now.

For it to end?

For it to continue?

For it to never stop?

Now that I can breathe, my body is coming alive again. Pinpricks in my fingers and toes to remind me I’m still here, that I can still fight. A slow, hard ache in my core. Taunting me.

Because I still want him, just like I’ve always wanted him.

Kai was my one and only. My everything.

And despite the hatred seething in his eyes, the bittersweet pain radiating through my chest, I never stopped wanting him.

It explains why, when he uses his stranglehold to lift me up against the tree, that I barely struggle .

That, when he growls, “Spread ‘em,” and jerks my thighs apart, that I let him.

And I don’t hesitate to wrap them around his waist, because he might just throttle me, or he might just fuck me.

I don’t know what I deserve.

Or what I want.

But he doesn’t give me a choice.

I never had a choice, not now, not when we played in the woods. And I liked that, because I’d spent most of my short life deciding for everyone else, including myself.

Kai gave me the freedom just to be.

My eyes flicker closed when he drags the hem of my sundress up my thighs. They fly open again when he sinks his fingers in, deep enough to dimple. Hard enough to bruise.

The hand around my throat tenses and relaxes as his attention shifts. His green eyes dart from my lips, to my throat, to my heaving chest, to where he’s clamping down on my leg.

“When did you become such an obedient mutt?” he muses to himself as he drags his fingernails up my inner thigh. They’re not long, not sharp, but he still leaves deep scratches behind that burn like hell.

When he shoves his hand between my legs and clamps down on my pussy, an electric thrill tears through me. I gasp, spluttering as his eyes dart back to mine and he tightens, tightens, tightens his grip on my neck.

I can’t speak anymore. He’s taken that from me, too.

Can’t object, can’t call for help.

Would I want to?

I’m holding onto his wrist, my fingernails digging in, drawing blood. I don’t remember when I grabbed him, only that my arms are tiring.

My legs shaking as I struggle to hold on to his waist.

There’s a distant yell. A student calling out to a friend. Neither of us bother to look. We’re not part of that world anymore. We’re in our reality now, the same forbidden, secret world we’d escape to when we met up in the woods.

A world where we could do anything, and never have to suffer the consequences.

He leans in, his breath a hot pant against the side of my neck as he uses the flat of his hand to rub my pussy. Back, forth, the friction driving me insane.

I grab his hair, yank at his head. His neck bends willingly enough, but the vicious gleam in his eyes is all the warning I get before he punishes me for interfering with his game.

He scrapes aside my underwear and shoves two fingers inside me so suddenly, so violently, that I gasp despite his strangling grip. My body bucks, but I’m not trying to get away.

I’m pushing him in deeper.

And then I’m rocking, hips arching, desperately chasing the growing ache burning inside me.

“Tryna come before I choke you out?” The tendons in Kai’s neck stand taut as he stares down his nose at me. “Yeah, I like the sound of that game. Let’s play.”

He steps back, and I lose my grip around his waist. My feet thump back onto the uneven ground, one ankle almost twisting as it lands on the edge of an exposed root.

Kai lets me take one sweet breath, then his hand is pinning my throat against the trunk again. I grab his wrist on instinct, but he tsks me with a shake of his head.

He holds up the hand he had between my legs, spreads his fingers.

“Look how fucking wet you are,” he says, glancing at the sticky web spanning between his fingers.

I shudder as he sticks those fingers in his mouth, his cheeks hollowing as he sucks. When he pulls them out, they’re soaked in saliva.

That wetness streaks my skin as he puts his hand up my skirt and tugs my underwear down to my knees .

I try to jerk my thighs away, but it doesn’t matter to him. Neither does clamping my legs closed. He shoves the blade of his hand between them anyway and twists, wrenching me open.

The hand around my throat tightens.

“Ready…set…go,” he whispers.

My eyes roll into my head when he rams his fingers inside me.

“You love being manhandled, don’t you? Pretending you’re the flowers and chocolates, making love by the fireplace kind of girl when all you want is someone to use you like they lost the receipt.”

The sound of his fingers slamming home drowns out everything, even the furious thump-thump of blood in my ears.

Heat builds on my face. Blood getting trapped. Air stagnated in my lungs. Prickles dance over my cheeks, down my arms.

But those sensations are faint, barely there compared to the wild, furious jolts of pleasure he sends into my core with each hard thrust of his hand.

Faster and faster he fingers me, until there’s a new heat building, and it’s between my legs, and I’m chasing it like a dog after a ball.

“Open your fucking eyes and look at me when I use you.”

My eyes flutter, but I force them open because I’m as curious as he is.

“There she is,” he murmurs, scanning my face, but locking back onto my eyes as his hand speeds up even more. I’m going numb in the most delicious, awful way. “You like being used like this, don’t you?”

My eyes roll up again. My hands fall away from his wrists. That numbness is spreading, moving through my body in a wave. The ache becomes a burn, an itch, a desperate, clawing urge to tip over the edge and fly.

Or fall to my death.

Kai ducks forward, his mouth by my ear. There’s a pinch, as if he bit my earlobe, but it’s distant, phantom.

“Hurry up and come, slut,” he hisses. “I don’t think you’ve got a lot of air left in those tiny lungs of yours.”

He’s right, but I don’t give a fuck anymore .

I’m blissed out, strung out, so fucking high on the thought that my one and only, my ever true love, is giving me what I’ve wanted since the moment I laid eyes on him.

That our souls are so entwined that he knows what I need without having to ask.

That he loves me enough to do this for me.

My lower body shakes, the rest of me limp as the last of my air is eaten by my starving lungs.

“Fucking come already.” His voice echoes through a dark and hollow place inside me. I think I smile, but maybe that’s just in my head.

My lower back thumps into the tree as his fingers spur me on. I’m groaning, grunting like a fucking animal, but I don’t hear a sound.

It’s so silent. So quiet. Just the fiery ache and the tingling numbness, spreading, spreading.

God, I’m so fucking close.

“Haven, you gotta fucking come.”

Something brushes my asshole. A slick finger, warm and hard.

“Yes.”

But there’s no sound.

I open my eyes, but it’s still dark.

Yes. Do it. Finish me. End this.

“Haven!”

I gasp as air surges into my lungs. I’m on my side, face pressed to the ground. Grass-stained sweatpants. Kai kneeling.

“Look at me?—

…when I use you…

—Haven. Please!”

Another huge, spluttering breath. I tilt my face, gaping up at Kai.

I was so fucking close.

He flinches when I grab his wrist, but does nothing to stop me when I roll onto my back and shove his hand between my legs.

I sound like a chain smoker when I rasp out, “I wasn’t fucking done. ”

The shock on Kai’s face sends an invisible whip crack through me.

He rips his hand away, staggers to his feet, throws a look around like he doesn’t have a fucking clue where he is, and then he runs.

He fucking runs .

It should make me feel so fucking good, so fucking powerful.

Instead, there’s just an aching emptiness inside me. Like he ripped something vital out of me and took it with him when he fled.

I’m still shaking, still sprawled in the dirt like some feral thing, and I can taste blood in my mouth from where I bit him. That’s nothing compared to the shameful heat still pulsing between my legs.

I almost came. From Kai choking me. From his fingers inside me while he cut off my air.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I press my face into the grass and try not to think about how his voice sounded when he called me baby.

How his cock felt pressed against me.

How some sick part of me wanted him to finish what he started…even if it killed me.