Page 34 of His Trick

No matter how tightly I held her, no matter how much she whispered my name like a prayer, I couldn’t shake him out of my thoughts. It was fucked up. I didn’t even know him until tonight. But now, anytime I closed my eyes, there he was.

I pushed away from Xanthy and walked to the door, trying to catch my breath.

“I need to fucking shower.”

She looked hurt. Alone on the ground where I’d left her, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that she thought I meant to wash her away. I couldn’t tell her the truth.

That I couldn’t shake the reality that Carrington had gotten under my skin in a way she never had.

The fucking air still stunk of iron. It was wet and sticky, and a stubborn stain in the grass. But the smell of Shiloh’s come was overriding my senses.

I didn’t like sex.

I didn’t like to be touched.

So why the fuck did his denials turn me on so much?

I crouched low, my hands working steadily as I dragged the last of the evidence into the pit I’d carved earlier. All the broken twigs, bloodied rags, and the faint trail of mud from where I’d dragged the body had to vanish.

I was many things, but sloppy wasn’t one of them. Sloppiness got you caught or killed. Neither of those options worked for me. Every drop of my victims’ blood was always buried. Nofootprint left unswept by nature’s hand or my own. Even the fucking cigarette butt one of the Harding boys had dropped out here when they were fucking had ended up ground into the dirt beneath my boots.

You are the one end I can’t seem to organize, Sunshine.

Shiloh’s ghost of a smirk lingered at the edge of my thoughts, with the sound of his strained breath still making my cock throb painfully in the leather pants. It was so adorable. He thought he’d won tonight, assumed that forcing me to my knees gave him the power.

He didn’t realize I was the one giving it. He was too overcome by his own need to realize that every second, my mouth was wrapped around him, that I was taking pieces of him in return.

I will let him writhe in his shame like a cockroach waiting to be crushed. He can stew in his anger because I know that fevered itch under his skin is me. And it will only grow.

By the time I poured the last shovelful of dirt over the pit, the woods looked untouched enough. At least like nothing had ever happened here besides the fevered fucking and the remnants of come coating the ground.

His come. Not mine. My kind of art.

I stripped off the gloves, shoved them into the burn bag in my pack on the ground, and stood.

That little fucker stole my weapon. I guess it was time to find out whether Shiloh liked playing with knives.

The bonfire was settling down, and the last of the hunters and prey had left the maze for the night. My family’s flashy ass mansion loomed in the distance, like a bruise in the dark sky. Its windows glowed faintly in the dark. This house wasn’t home, not to me.

Not anymore.

Truth be told, I hadn’t felt like those walls were a home for years, way before I moved out on my own, and even more sonow, as I looked up at the windows’ dark silhouettes. My mother and father were the exact stereotype of everything wrong with the rich and famous.

My mom used so much shit on her plastic face and body, she was one step away from killing babies and bathing in their blood to stay young and fake.

My father, when he was around, was a money tycoon of absolute whoring heights.

Mom knew of his slutty ways, but the dollar signs on her allowance checks kept her fake tits perky. That alone was enough for her to turn her cheek and keep his thick black office door closed.

I was about six years old when I killed a mouse, strangled the bitch right in my palm. When I brought it to my mother, she ignored me, not bothering to look, and told me to play with my toys.

When I brought it to my father, that was the first time he looked at me with something more equivalent to interest. My dad saw ways to manipulate and train me to be his perfect monster. We went hunting on weekends while Mom had her spa days. Xanthy was too stupid to know anything. She just bitched about never being allowed to tag along on the hunts.

But they weren’t just hunts.

They were practicing.

My father would find animals that were just like the mouse I presented to him as a kid. As I got older, it was wild game. Hogs that screamed and tried to gore my sides as I ripped them open, Bobcats that matched my strength and left enough scars as trophies.