Page 5 of Kings & Queen

Each of her cries of pain and her words asking me to stop echoed in my head, driving me further into the darkness. I lost complete control of myself, and there was no excuse for my behavior. My chest tightened with regret and self-loathing. The emotion was so strong it was suffocating me.

She had looked at me with such hurt and confusion. I raked my hands through my hair. The churning in my stomach wouldn’t cease.I raped her. The blood that flowed down her legs and covered my cock was evidence enough of how roughly I had treated her.What the fuck had I done?

Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t even hear the knock on my door. I jumped, my heart racing, and whipped my head up. Alek stood there, concern etched on his face. For a moment, I couldn’t process his presence.

“I—” My voice caught in my dry throat. “What?”

He stepped closer, his brow furrowed. “I’ve been calling your name. You didn’t hear me?”

Pinning my stare on the floor, I shook my head, trying to pull myself together. I couldn’t look at him. The guilt was too much.

“No, I…I didn’t hear anything.”

“Is Kinsley in here?” he barked, his voice laced with urgency.

I finally looked up, startled, and his expression bordered on panic as he scanned the room. His eyes shifted from corner to corner.

“No, she’ll be sleeping in her room, or you and Nik can have her.” I could barely get the words out.

A fresh wave of guilt crashed over me, but I swallowed hard, trying to keep my cool. His brow furrowed, and he took a step farther into the room, glancing at me with a mixture of confusion and desperation.

“Blade, I’m not entirely sure what happened between the two of you—”

Nik burst through the door, his face a mask of terror. “I found her phone,” he exclaimed, breathless, holding it up as if it were a lifeline. “But she’s nowhere to be found.”

His vivid green eyes, so similar to our mother’s, were wide, frantic, as he looked between Alek and me. “I’ve searched everywhere,” he continued, his voice trembling. “She’s just…gone.”

The room immediately closed in on me, the walls pressing tighter as their concern and panic magnified my guilt and disgust. My heart seized inside my chest as the reality of what I’d done hit. I couldn’t breathe.

“We need to look again,” Alek stated, taking off.

I leaped off the bed, taking off after them both. We spent the next hour combing the entire grounds—twice—in a frantic search for any sign of her. We spread out and called her name, our voices growing hoarse and desperate. The afternoon sun was sinking lower, and shadows crept in.

Close by where Nik had discovered her phone, we found a bunch of yellow flowers she’d picked. They lay scattered on the grass, as if she’d dropped them in haste. It was a small, innocent detail, yet it screamed of something more.

We continued our search, but to no avail. There were no signs of struggle, no clues to suggest where she might have gone. It was as if she had vanished, leaving nothing but a chilling silence in her wake.

The minutes dragged on, and my eyes drifted to the wall at the edge of the property, the one she had scaled twice before when she needed to escape. Could she have gone that way again? My mind raced with possibilities, each one more unsettling than the last.

The wall mocked me. If she had climbed it again, where would she have gone? And why hadn’t she taken her phone? The questions swirled in my mind, each one twisting the knot of worry tighter in my chest. We needed to find her, and soon. This was all my fault.

“Her blade, it has GPS,” I said, my voice breaking thesilence.

She faithfully wore the blade I gave her with the tracker embedded in the hilt. Without waiting for a response, I sprinted back to my room, Nik and Alek close on my heels.

I fumbled with the lock screen on my phone and pulled up the app. My fingers trembled as I scrolled. Every second felt like an eternity. The app closed out abruptly, and I wanted to scream. Taking a deep breath, I opened it again. This time it loaded.

A blinking dot signaled her location, and relief flooded through me. “She’s in her room,” I said, showing the screen to the guys.

We exchanged a glance.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Alek replied.

“We check again,” Nik exclaimed, already heading toward the door.

Surely, she wasn’t hiding. And she would have heard us calling her name over and over. We rushed down the hall, our footsteps echoing in the otherwise silent house. I pushed her door open, and it was as she had left it. Seemingly empty. The bed was made, the window slightly ajar, letting in a gentle breeze.

We called her name again, but there was no answer. Desperation surged within me, and I scanned the room, stopping on her dresser. There, lying conspicuously on the polished wood, was her blade. Its sleek surface reflected the light, and I picked up the weapon, feeling the cool metal against my skin.