Quintessentially Q (Monsters in the Dark #2)(107)

Own me, take me, you can never break me. Choose me, use me, you will never lose me…



I existed in blackness.

Nothing else entered apart from the metallic rust of blood and flashes of madness.

Q left me again.

Somehow, I transported back to the room where I shot Blonde Hummingbird, only this time, strapped down and tied up tight was White Man. He leered and cursed, telling me I wasn’t good enough. That I ought to kill myself because that’s all I was worth.

The vacancy inside swirled like a crazy hurricane, rattling at the walls of my tower, tearing away my chains, smashing bricks to dust.

The guilt I’d been running from sucked me deep and I was sure my heart would stop. I was a murderer, a torturer, I deserved to die paralyzing regret.

But fate had given me a chance to right the wrongs I’d done. I had the puppeteer in front of me. Hatred and fury slithered like reptiles in my blood, and all I wanted was revenge. To make him pay.

The wash of emotions I’d been hiding from crippled me. Dumping me into a pit of grief and insanity.

White Man represented all the evil in the world and I wanted to take and take and take until there was no more. I wanted to extract every last thread of life until he existed no longer.

By killing him, I would gain redemption. I might finally be able to live with the guilt.

He didn’t move as I hit him. He just sneered. My muscles ached from delivering abuse. With every strike another brick crashed free from my tower. With every lash, cracked and fissured my guilt, allowing me to breathe.

Parallel images of the past kept me company as I hit him over and over and over. I saw myself—emaciated, drugged out of my mind, scratching and breaking…delivering their wrath on innocent women.

I sobbed and hit harder as my apparition shot Blonde Hummingbird. I doubled over with agony as I watched a replay of myself swallowing the gun, pulling the trigger to end my life.

Never again. I’m strong enough to survive. I don’t need a tower to exist. I didn’t do anything wrong!

The thought was a comet, blazing with truth.

I didn’t do anything wrong.

It was all them. I did the best I could to survive.

The knowledge that they’d made me doubt, that they’d filled me so full of sin, gave me a new lease of energy. I struck harder and harder until I couldn’t recognise White Man from all the cuts and blood.

Every time I drew blood, I rested easier, knowing this man would never do to others what he did to me.

When he passed out, I thought I’d killed him. I wanted him dead, but I had to be sure. Checking for life, I cursed when his pulse thrummed beneath my fingertips. I knew what I had to do.

I would wake him, look straight into his eyes, then I would stab him in the heart.

This was my duty, my honour, my destiny.

I taught him the lessons he taught me. Pain equalled power. Pain equalled pleasure.

As I stood above him with sharp scissors in my hands, ready to bury them deep into his chest, he looked up with such panic and love I paused too long.

He screamed.

It bounced around the cavern of blackness, tearing down the veil between me and the real world.

The vision disintegrated, catapulting me from dark to bright. The dungeon switched to become a decadent room with gold and red accents—it seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place why.

I blinked, unable to understand. Where the hell am I?

My body ached, shoulders trembled with holding my arms ready to strike. My hands were cramped and slippery with blood.

Then my heart stopped.

Q lay on the bed in front of me, his naked body covered in blood, completely unrecognisable. He barely breathed, his face swollen, eyes muted, hidden by injury.

I dropped the scissors; they clattered downward, nicking the top of my bare foot before bouncing to the carpet. Air lodged deep in my lungs and I couldn’t breathe.

An earthquake began in my limbs, and the angry, righteous tears I’d shed were replaced with horror. “Q—Oh, my God.” I reached out with shuddering hands to touch his cooling chest. His beautiful sparrow tattoo hung in tatters with wounds and blood. His beautiful cock hung useless and bloody between his legs.

“What have I done!”

Then I was flying.

My front collided with the front of the bed before I was jerked back and pressed deep into the carpet. Someone wrenched my arms behind my back, pinning my cheek to the floor. “Don’t move,” a livid man’s voice ordered.

The man sat on my back, holding me in place. He changed position to look toward the bed. He sucked in a rattling breath. “Fuck, Q. What the f*ck.”

A woman’s high-pitched scream made my shaking worse. I gave up crying and turned to sobbing. I did this. I hurt Q so much he looked ready to die. How did this happen? Why did he let me go so far?

“Merde. Q. Oh, my god. Oh, my god,” Suzette cried.

The man got off me, discarding me as if I was nothing. He jumped to his feet, rushing to the bedside.

I fumbled to sit up. I needed to know Q was still alive. That there was a way to fix this.

Franco’s emerald eyes flashed back to me, glittering with ferocity. “You did this?” He shook his head, fingers scrambling at the bindings around Q’s bleeding ankles. “How could you?”

My lungs lodged in my throat; I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t justify what I’d done or even remember how it happened. All I knew was I no longer existed in a lifeless void. I now lived in an eternity of self-regret and pain. I’d been given closure and revenge on White Man and what happened in Rio, but I would take that agony all over again if it meant Q wasn’t lying lifeless and ruined by my hand.