Page 25 of His Trick

“I hate you,” she whispered, arms wrapping around herself to shield herself from my uninterested gaze. “I should’ve let you kill that rabbit. Someone’s going to make you pay one day. I hope they see the monster in you and toy with you the way you do others…and only then finally fucking kill you.”

I pulled back from the tree, my hands still trembling. Anger and shame bit through the shroud around me.

The woods were silent again.

She grabbed the broken pieces of her pants and took off running back toward the maze. I wasn’t worried about her snitching on me.

She didn’t know who I was. There were hundreds of the same smiley-masked men in these woods. She knew she’d never get any form of justice.

I growled, punching the tree bark, my knuckles splitting open.

“Fuck you,” I said to no one, but the echoing voice in my mind.

Carrington.

Carrington Fucking Harding.

That orgasm of letting go, finally breaking a damn bitch under my cock, no longer babying them and being the magical fuck they wanted, was nothing. Nothing compared to the orgasm that made me shake.

Nothing compared to how he made me come…

“Fuck!” I screamed, punching a tree until I watched blood drip down my knuckles, illuminated by the flashlight on the ground. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

It was a chant. A spell I repeated on replay, trying to break through the shadow of my mind. I had to get a fucking grip. I had to walk back to the fucking mansion, look Xanthy in the face and maintain any shred of control I had left.

Will you still love me, Xanthy?

I parroted her silhouette in my mind, leaning lazily on the siding of the house.

Will you love me when I snap your brother’s fucking neck?

The dirt clung in wet droplets to my knuckles as I shoved another layer of leaves over their rippable pale skin, not my cleanest work.

I’d been rushed, distracted.

The girl’s hair still glinted through the brush like strands of thread, stubborn and shining because it was wet with the lake’s final goodbye.

I cursed under my breath and ground it deeper into my three-foot hole. The normal decay of a body would take care of itself.

No one would look here because all guests would be accounted for at their exits.

Snap.

The sound behind me was no surprise. But it was not an animal. The echo of the sneaking footsteps was too heavy and too careless.

I tsked, a smile spreading over my lips as I listened. It could have been one of the boys from the maze, stumbling out toward the woods with a willing dumbo to fuck. But there was something familiar about the steps, their breath carrying in the silence.

I didn’t turn, not yet.

I let them sweat.

I let them think they were safe in the dark. But I knew. My sister’s boyfriend was as persistently annoying as she was, or so it appeared, which interested me. That was more than I could ever say about anyone besides myself.

When the person spoke, their words were tight and biting. It was indeed the deep, angered tone of none other than Shiloh Anderson.

“The fuck are you doing?”

I rose to my full height, slow enough to make it deliberate. The gloves on my hands were stained, the blood sticky against my wrists, but I didn’t bother to hide them. I met his stare across the shadows, watched his eyes flicker to the ground behind me, where the earth wasn’t sitting right.