Page 112 of My Girl

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“I’m not,” he says.

Crave’s brown eyes focus on me, irritation clouding his gaze. His upper lip twitches, daring me to defy him.

This—taunting me, getting me to hurt him—wasn’t an accident. Hewantedme to hurt him.

“Why?” I ask.

He glances at the mirror, our bodies halved in the dim reflection. Two murderers, bound together by so much more than blood.

“It was boring,” he murmurs. “Always being in control.”

My eyelids flutter, processing those words. “But you like power,” I say.

“I still have power,” he says. “I want more than that with you though.”

My heart clenches in my chest. There is—and always will be—a power struggle between us. We’re hot-tempered, fixated on the thrill of violence, unable to see human life as valuable. Still, we see each other. Accept each other. We fall into our rhythm, and we embrace our truest selves.

“You’ll never be able to hold a weapon with your dominant hand again,” I say.

Crave doesn’t say a word, and his lack of an answer tells me it’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted to have a disadvantage when it comes to me, so that we would have an equal fight.

I push his shoulders back until he’s lying on the bed. I pull down his pants and boxers, his cock shriveled and limp against his thigh. I remove the rings and metal bars until his cock is nothing more than a calloused and scarred shaft. Bumpy. Naked. The way it was when he forced me to eat his ass.

I take all of him in my mouth, sucking him in. Biting the base. His cock pulses inside of me, excitement brewing as the pain ruminates through his body. He groans, loud and clear, transferring his power to me. I increase my movement, using one hand to hold his chest down and using the other to fondle his hairy balls. And when he comes, I pull my mouth to the tip and squeeze the base of his shaft as hard as I can, milking him of his cum.

His seed lathers my tongue. I keep it in my mouth.

I crawl over his body. He narrows his eyes, and I grab his chin, pinching him until he opens his mouth.

I let my spit and his cum drip onto his tongue. It paints his pink muscle in streaks of bubbly white. I smirk down at him. Like this—the way we are now, where I accept myself for who I am, with him by my side—I have more power than I’ve ever had.

He swallows it, his eyes fixed on mine. Warmth flushes my skin, arousal licking across my pussy until I can’t hold back anymore.

I press my lips to his, tasting his tongue.

I’ll never have what other people have. Comfort. Safety. Love. But I will have this. And this—whateverthisis—is more than that. A connection deeper than selflessness. A relationship that isn’t built on thepromisesof equality.

No—what we have is physical equality and a commitment where we both know that we’ll live, breathe, and die together, because we can’t stand to let the other person go. It’s not about respecting each other. It’s about owning each other.

I went looking for my father. To find his truth and shove it in my mother’s face. To prove her wrong. To show my mother that I am good too, just like he was. We were simply misunderstood.

Instead, I found Crave, a man who forced me to acknowledge my darker side, who accepted me for who I am. A man who forced me to permanently wound him so that there would be something more than his physical strength keeping me by his side. I found a person so evil, so fucking selfish, that he’d never let me go.

And he found me.

Epilogue

Daddy

one year later

My girl staresin the mirror. Blonde hair. Black roots. A jagged nose and a scar on her eyebrow, both of which I gave to her. The same night she gave me a black eye.

I don’t have a matching scar, but sometimes, my ocular nerves twitch, and it’s like she’s got her finger wrapped around my insides.

She squints at me, then smirks.