Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(72)

Maybe it’s suddenly colder in the apartment, I don’t know, but it feels like my blood drops a few degrees at that thought. I picture Rach’s scars, the badly-healed puckers and dips in her flesh, until something nauseous twists my belly. Fear, yes, but another sensation besides.

Envy. I envy her once intimate relationship with him, despite the unfathomable stretch of pain that lingers ever after. If only I had access to his thoughts like that, I could do so much more.

Your email has been saved as a draft.

I deserve to drown.





CHAPTER TEN


Leo


Regret (noun): an alcoholic beverage, often binged on, never purged.




The first time he comes, I wake with my legs apart.

I’ve been warm for days in the dry heat of the island; it’s so unnerving to be cooler. But here I am, stripped, rough fabric against my back on the pallet, and my hands are pulled above me, cuffed to a ring on the wall. He lies between my legs, breathing over my bare skin and tracing the faint scars that criss-cross my inner thighs. Though it’s dark in here, I see awe creep across his brow.

“Aeron?” I whisper, unsure.

His gaze rolls up to meet mine, and it’s not Aeron at all. Perhaps once, he was like him, but then the unkind years crawled in. This is the second Aeron, the faded echo. He smells hot and sour, like death, and I know now that I’ve gone beyond fear; I exist in the other place now, the crimson war of shock.

He has a voice like a preacher, full of force and calm at the same time. “I didn’t expect this. I don’t know why.”

I try to writhe back, to put my knee in his face, but he pins my legs in two swift moves and leaves me yelping beneath the crush of him. When I slow, he brings one hand down to prod at the open lips of my *.

“He hasn’t cut you here,” he says thoughtfully.

“N—no.”

“But he wants to.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Of course he wants to.” He drags his cool palm down my thigh. Gets up. Stares down. “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” I lie, though despair cuts my voice to vague slivers, and of course, he understands. I can’t bring myself to say the name I gave him out loud.

“Well.” He cocks his head, appraising me as if I’m up for auction. “You can call me Abel.”

“Nice to meet you, Abel.” I pull my legs together. Try not to think about how my arms ache like they’ve been tied up in this position for hours, which means they probably have. “A pleasure.”

“Is it?”

I say nothing. Shiver. Close my eyes to balm the slow hammering in my head. This is all normal. Just a normal day at the office, and Mr. Abel is just another colleague, or a stranger chatting me up in the deli, or a dog-walker who smiles at me in the park. He has a brain and a heart and they function perfectly, the way brains and hearts ought to do.

Please.

Please.

“You were always going to be last,” he tells me with reverence. “Lucky number four.”

Tears grow fat in the corners of my eyes, and I squeeze hard to keep them from slipping.

“Why?” Why any of them?

“Just something I have to do. You shouldn’t worry.”

“But what? What did you have to do?”

He kneels and shuffles forward until his face is just inches from mine. Twisted Aeron, skewed and false. Though he gropes around on the floor, pulling things around in scraping fistfuls, he never once drops eye contact and never lets me feel like I can look away. Just a dog-walker, smiling in the park.

Please.

Finally, he presents me with a pair of panties that look like mine—pink satin, almost raspberry, the waistband threaded with lilac ribbon—and scrunches them carefully into a ball while he takes long, loud breaths.

“Open up,” he murmurs. “Come on now, Cock Sleeve. Do as your daddy tells you. Isn’t that what you do?” He scrubs the balled-up panties against my closed mouth with increasing frustration. When that fails, he pinches my nose between his finger and thumb and pushes the tissues so hard together that even the cartilage throbs.

My lungs burn. I can’t—couldn’t hold—

Just another guy, a decent guy, a guy who’ll even help me get away from the monster who has chained me up—

Ahhh—

The moment my mouth snaps open, he shoves the panties in. Dry fabric grates against the dryer roof of my mouth, and when I try to breathe in, I suck down only stale, smothering satin that makes me retch and cough. Panic scissors through me until I lie in two quivering halves.

“I hold no interest in a smart mouth. I won’t indulge you the way my boy does. Do you understand?”

I promised myself a lot of things in those first few moments with the clone, but I never promised I wouldn’t cry. My tears harden in their ducts, swelling like bullets in the hand-warmed guts of a gun, and when I lose my grip on the trigger, they shoot through to heat my cheeks. Wet. Hot. A mockery of arousal.

“Because if you don’t understand, we have a problem. And problems…well, they’re just begging to be solved.”

Perhaps this is all Aeron’s doing. He brought me here for this; I walked right in, sat down and practically threw my arms out, screaming, take me! That strange look on his face this past week, it wasn’t apathy—it was smothered anticipation, and any second now, he’ll breeze through with his slick little scalpel in hand to finally take the liberties I’ve denied him.