Out of Love(83)

“Put your fists up, you fucking monster. I’m not done making you bleed.”

“Good girl. Give me your pain.”

I was not his good girl. Those two words had me seeing red.

I gave him my pain. Another jab to his face, my knee in his stomach. My leg swept his, taking him to the ground where I straddled him and hit his face until the skin on my knuckles mixed with the blood from his face.

“I hate you!” My fight weakened into nothing more than my fists pounding his chest as he remained absolutely still with his hands limp at his sides, not fighting back one bit, taking everything and surrendering to every breath of my pain.

Hugging my bloodied hands to my chest, I closed my eyes and sobbed.

He didn’t move for the longest time, as if he knew what I needed even if I didn’t know anything at the moment other than I hated life.

Inching his way to sitting, he rested his hands on my legs straddling him. I felt his warm breath on my face.

Minty.

Familiar.

Torturous.

“Yours,” he whispered as his hands framed my face.

“You belong to her,” I said in defeat with broken words and without opening my eyes.

“I belong to you.”

“She’s your wife.”

“You’re my whole fucking world.”

I opened my eyes to the bloodied face I’d created.

His lips pressed to mine. As he moved them slowly, I tasted the metallic blood along his lips.

He wasn’t mine, but I was his.

Our kiss deepened, and I moaned as his tongue slid into my mouth.

He wasn’t mine, but I was his.

As his mouth took everything I had to give him, his hands ghosted from my face to my shoulders, pushing off my robe. My fingers reacquainted themselves with his hair while his mouth sucked in a nipple. I seethed when his teeth dug into it, tugging it like he was on the verge of losing control.

He wasn’t mine, but I was his.

“Wylder …” I closed my eyes, arching my back.

He released my nipple. “Shh … don’t say anything.” He took my other nipple and tugged until I groaned from the clash of pleasure and pain.

My hands left his hair and curled at his shoulders and back, pulling up his shirt one inch at a time. He shrugged it off and attacked my mouth again, all control lost.

He wasn’t mine, but I was his.

Flipping me over onto my back, he hovered above me, controlling my mouth as I worked the button and zipper to his jeans. It was so wrong. But nothing about us ever really felt wrong except when we were apart.

Wrong …

He lifted onto his knees for mere seconds to push down his jeans and briefs to his thighs as I waited, naked on my wadded-up robe, hating myself for not being able to stop what was about to happen.

He wasn’t mine, but I was his.

Smearing blood from his face up my torso and over my breasts to my neck and face, he lowered his body and pushed into me with one hard thrust.

No condom.

No questions.

No regrets.

I was a monster too.

Two monsters fucking like nothing or no one else in the world existed. Monsters held no accountability. They were selfish. And they feared nothing … not even death.

I was his … and he was mine.





Chapter Thirty-Five




Wylder


You can never see her again.

You will always be dead to her.

Slade Wylder is dead.

Had I chosen prison, she would have lived knowing I was alive and forever taken from her.

So I chose to force her to let me go without choice.

I chose to watch her move on with her life, a special kind of torture that I felt like I deserved. Jackson Knight felt it was fitting as well. I knew he loved her; it was its own special variety of sick love, as most parental love is … overprotective, controlling, suffocating.

My father was a controlling, sick bastard who deserved to die.

My uncle shared those same traits, and he, too, deserved to die.

I didn’t think Jackson Knight deserved the same fate, but he also didn’t deserve one drop more than I promised him.

The marriage. That was the one secret I was not allowed to compromise. He vowed to personally remove my soul from the earth if I ever told anyone. It was his safeguard.

If you ever come face to face with her, she can never know.

At five in the morning, she tiptoed from the bathroom to her closet, wrapped in a towel, hair wet but combed straight. I reached across the bed and turned on the nightstand light.

She whipped around, eyes wide, hands tightening the towel around her body. “Sorry. I … I have work.”

I sat up, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands before scrubbing the rest of my face. “I know. I have to go too.”

“Yeah.” With her back to me, she dropped her towel and slid on black panties and a matching bra. “Who protects Floyd when you’re…” she glanced over her shoulder and rubbed her lips together to contain her smile “…up to no good.”

I scratched my jaw and neck. “I lead his travel team. When he’s on the go, I’m there. When he’s home or secured in a hotel, I’m allowed to roam and…” I grinned “…be up to no good.”

As she stepped into a fitted blue skirt and zipped it in the back, she glanced up at me, her lips the opposite of a suppressed smile. “I slept with a married man,” she murmured.