Page 85 of The Villain's Beast

Chapter 59

Fletcher

With everyone’s eyes on Vince’s Sig Sauer, I made sure my eyes were on everyone else. Bellamy was paler than ever, almost green and I worried he was about to throw up. As soon as the gun landed on the table, he reached for Gideon’s hand, which had me wanting to crawl across the table and introduce him to the business end of that weapon in a far more intimate sense. Gideon, for his part, looked bored. Daren, for what might have been the first time since we’d all sat down, looked away from the gun to Luca, then to me. Luca looked from the gun to Gideon.

“What do you plan to do with that, Vince?” I asked, stretching my legs out in front of me.

“Nothing unless I have to.”

Bellamy shoved his chair away from the table, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk.

“I think I’m gonna…” was all he managed before covering his mouth and bolting for the bathroom.

Gideon moved to go after him, but I was faster. “You stay.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, but for once, he swallowed his tongue.

I pushed my chair away from the table and found Bellamy on the floor of the second level bathroom, his face pressed against the cool porcelain edge of the bathtub. I turned off the lights and closed the door, folding myself down into the small space beside him.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“None of this is all right,” he said, closing his eyes.

“It was unfair of your father to bring you into this,” I said. It was as much of an apology as I’d ever be able to give him.

“It’s hard for me to be mad,” Bellamy whispered, rocking his head side to side, cooling his cheek and forehead against the bathtub.

“I’d be fuming.”

“I mean, I am. He…he fucking sold me off, Fletcher. Like, who does that?”

“A small man,” I answered. “A scared man. A hungry one…”

“He knew what was going to happen to me.” Bellamy blinked open his gorgeous eyes, staring up at me with a still and startling clarity. “With the initiation.”

“If I’d known?—”

He interrupted me, stretching his arm out until his fingers grazed across the top of my knee. “You did what you were supposed to.”

“Bellamy.”

“I can’t be mad about it now,” he said softly.

I set my hand on top of his, engulfing his fingers, his palm disappearing entirely beneath my own. “You could.”

“But I have you now. Don’t I?”

A knot expanded in the back of my throat, and I grabbed Bellamy, hauling him out of the nook beside the toilet and onto my lap. He came easily, tucking himself against my chest, burying his face into my throat.

“Don’t I?” he repeated.

I’d spent so many years of my life only wanting Gideon. Even knowing I’d never be allowed to have him, even expecting my father to force me into marriage with a woman, I’d wanted him. I’d fucked more people than I could count, but they’d never mattered. Not in the way Gideon had, but then there was Bellamy and Daren and Luca, and my entire life had flipped upside down.

Daren and Luca loved each other with such an intense ferocity, it was impossible to not get swept up in that in some way. Harder still to fight it after sharing a bed with them. Bellamy, though. The most unexpected addition of all, with his bravery and his tenderness…

The five of us couldn’t have been more different, and yet together everything clicked. Just like the five-petaled oaths Gideon and I had taken that damned us to this miserable life, the five of us together had the potential to form something even stronger to break the curse of it all.

“You have me,” I whispered into the top of his hair, kissing him and catching a whiff of Gideon as he moved to search for my mouth.