Page 21 of Dance of the Phoenix (Cloak of the Vampire #3)

Logan

For three years, Aileen stayed with my family.

During those three years, we started dating in public once we turned fifteen. It was partly because I hated hiding our relationship from my parents but mostly because my possessiveness of her reached new heights, and I wanted the entire world to know she was mine .

Because when Aileen turned fifteen, she started attracting much more attention than she had before.

I caught our classmates, and even juniors and seniors, staring at her when she passed through the high school corridors, their eyes scanning her from head to toe.

I even heard some of my soccer team members talking about her while they rated the level of fuckability of all the girls in our grade. They rated her too high.

It drove me up a wall, having to keep our relationship a secret. I didn’t want to anymore. I wanted to snarl and growl like a fucking animal at everyone who dared look at her. I wanted to show her off.

So to do that, I had to let my parents know.

Unfortunately, that conversation didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.

“Aileen’s your sister !” Mom said after I sat her and Dad down to tell them the news. I wanted to do it alone, without Aileen, because I feared something like this might happen, and thank goodness I did that.

“ Foster sister, Mom,” I countered, folding my arms. “It’s not like you adopted her. She’s not legally my sister.”

Dad looked at me with concern. “You know we adore Aileen,” he told me in his calm way, “but I believe what your mother’s afraid of is that a relationship between you two at such a young age is bound to end badly.”

“I know we’re only fifteen,” I said, getting angry. “But Aileen is the one for me. I’m going to marry her when we’re old enough.”

Mom and Dad stared at me as if they’d never seen me before. “Logan, honey ...” Mom said, eyes wide. “Relationships at such a young age might not go too far.”

“You have no right to say that,” I snapped, now furious. “You and Dad met when you were our age! So what’s the difference?”

They couldn’t say anything back to that. So reluctantly, after a tense conversation, they gave Aileen and me their blessing.

And the next day, I held Aileen’s hand the entire time we spent at school and glowered at anyone who dared think they could steal what was mine.

Because I wasn’t kidding when I told my parents I planned to marry Aileen. It was the truth. The absolute truth.

I refused to let her go, no matter what.

Until I was forced to, the day her father got out of jail and took her away.

Even after Aileen was no longer a foster child, we arranged meetings in an old shed in the backyard of the small house Aileen’s father rented after he was released.

At first, I didn’t understand why we had to meet in that shed. Why couldn’t she introduce me to her father? Why did we have to hide as if we were doing something wrong?

Aileen had been tight lipped and resolute about her decision, though. All she said was that her father wouldn’t approve and left it at that, no matter how much I tried to push her for answers.

I knew she was hiding secrets. She wouldn’t talk about her father—I’d learned he was in jail through my parents, not her. I wanted to know what he did time for—I believed that after three years of dating I deserved that much—but Aileen refused to tell.

It drove me insane, but I forced myself to be patient. I believed she’d come around and tell me when she was ready.

Even at sixteen, I was still naive enough to think that I knew Aileen at all.

It gutted me that I couldn’t just see her every day like I had when she lived at my house.

What made it even worse was the secrecy she forced on our relationship once more.

It was only at school when I was allowed to show her affection—thankfully, her father allowed her to stay in school and not go back to being homeschooled, as she had been before being fostered by my parents.

But even that wasn’t enough.

Nothing was enough when it came to Aileen. I wanted everything. I wanted her to submit herself entirely to me.

Because that’s what I did. I was hers. Completely, utterly hers.

And I couldn’t help but feel like she wasn’t mine. No matter how much I tried.

It became more and more obvious when we had sex. When we first started screwing around, I knew we both felt the same. We both felt pleasure. We enjoyed it equally.

But once she returned to her father, things started going awry in that regard.

Suddenly, every time we had sex, she stared at me and faked her orgasms.

She’d never faked them before.

I knew Aileen’s body. I knew what it felt like when she truly came. But suddenly, she wasn’t feeling it. In fact, it almost seemed like she was bored every time we did it.

And that hurt.

It hurt so fucking much.

So one time, when I sneaked into the shed, I decided it was time to find out what the hell was going on. Because I wanted her to be the Aileen I knew, who enjoyed my body as much as I did hers, who didn’t feel like she had to fake her orgasms to make me feel good or something.

Little did I know that day would be my ruin.

Because the moment I went in, she didn’t even say hi; she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me long, deep, and wet.

Since I was in love with the girl, all I could do was respond in kind. I was desperate to feel wanted and needed by her, and so I let her do whatever she wanted to me.

The moment we were on the short mattress in the shed, stopping our kiss to catch a breath, I said, “Tell me what you want.”

She looked at me with her beautiful, mesmerizing eyes and said, “I don’t think you can handle it.”

I felt affronted by her assumption. “I can, Leenie,” I said, calling her by the nickname I’d given her years ago. “Anything you want, just tell me.”

Studying me, she said nothing for a few long moments. Then, she said, “Okay.”

At first, it was nothing I couldn’t handle. She tied my hands to the bars attached to the shed’s wall and then straddled me, caressing my body until I struggled against the shackles.

By the time she reached for my hardness, I was drowning in lust, and all I could do was plead with her. “Leenie ... please ...”

She let go and caught my gaze. “This is what I want you to do to me,” she whispered as her hands closed around my neck, her nails digging into my skin so painfully, I couldn’t help but gasp, excitement and fear warring inside me.

And then she strangled me.

At first, I didn’t realize what she was doing exactly.

I knew Aileen had some kinks, even though most of our sex was more fumbling than anything else.

But the moment I’d asked her to all but let go, it seemed I allowed a dark side of Aileen to show.

A side of her I was faintly aware of but never gave too much thought to.

I thrashed against the restraints as I felt the air leaving me. It was impossible to breathe. Tears clouded my vision as I begged her with my eyes to stop. But when I saw the euphoric look on her face, I realized something I should have figured out a long time ago.

Alarms went off in my head as I thrashed harder against her. It was only when I felt myself growing limp, my consciousness threatening to leave my body, that Aileen finally released the pressure and sat straight.

Breaths coming in short, wide eyed, and full of fear, I stared at her.

I was reminded of the few times Aileen had taught me some of the martial arts she knew.

It was a particular martial art called Iovan’s Imperium, and I remembered how delighted she was when she executed the Behests on me under the guise of showing me how it worked.

She had the same exhilarated look on her face then as she did now, seeing me in pain.

“More,” she whispered, pressing her lips against my cold ones. “I need you to do this, and more ...”

Before that evening in the shed, I’d never known what real pain was. Growing up in a somewhat sheltered environment, I’d never experienced pain as a part of my life.

But when Aileen showed me the horrors that she wanted me to do to her, it was the first time I knew true pain.

The strangulation was almost child’s play in comparison to what she later did to me.

I begged her to stop. I begged her to show mercy. To see that I hated what she was doing to me. That she was right—I couldn’t handle the things she wanted.

But every time I saw her elated look as she inflicted pain worse than anything I’d ever felt, my fear trembled under the weight of my love for her. I loved her so much that seeing her so happy made me want to make her even happier.

And because I was so gone for her, it reached the point where I passed out and later woke up in a hospital bed, the painkillers barely numbing the thudding ache I could feel throughout my entire body.

My parents didn’t let me see Aileen after that. If I were in their position, I wouldn’t have let myself see her either.

But I was still a confused seventeen-year-old boy who was deeply in love, despite everything, with a girl. I wanted to see her, needed to see her, and get some answers. Because by that point, I knew Aileen was not the fragile little girl I’d always perceived her to be.

By that point, I knew about the crimes Aileen’s father committed. I knew what he’d done, and what Aileen had had to go through her entire childhood. And yet I always refused to see what she truly was because I wanted to believe people could change. That blood didn’t dictate shit.

It took me a few months, until just before I turned eighteen, to finally reach out to her and ask to meet.

I was terrified of seeing her. There was a discrepancy in my mind between Aileen, the girl who hurt me so badly I had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks, and Leenie, the girl I was in love with, whom I wanted to protect and cherish.