I slipped out of my chair and followed Hudson to the back of the block where he had the girl against the wall, one hand on her neck and the other unfastening his belt.
There was a small bag with me that I brought specially for him, and I moved closer to them, reaching inside for the darts I had.
“I want to fuck your hole so bad,” he said, in haste to free his dick from his briefs. I picked two darts and aimed as he fisted it, the girl getting ready in position for him. Too bad for her, she had to look for another man to satiate her desire. Hudson was mine for tonight.
Squinting—because they picked a semi-dark place to make love outside the club—I tossed the dart as he was about to slide in, her left leg over his shoulder.
Bull’s eye.
He screamed like a bitch as he jumped back, staring down at the dart dangling from his length. Who knew I was still perfect at aiming.
The girl saw me first as I approached them, and she took off without another breath. Hudson’s trousers were around his ankle, his dick lying limp on his palm.
“You did this! Fuck! What the fuck! You fucking bastard!”
Grabbing his hair, I envisioned him laying his dirty hand on what was mine, and the anger came easily. I smashed his head against the wall.
I didn’t want to kill him yet. Since he left a mark on Ainsley’s skin, I would do more than just killing him.
It would help anyway. With the piled up frustration of seeing Ainsley everyday to going a week without meeting her because I had to force myself into control somehow, to needing her after witnessing her glorious nakedness with that breast piercing I wanted to bite so much...I ached for a relief.
One that sex with anyone wouldn’t give, but giving this bastard a slow death would help.
Taking him by his shirt, I dragged him across the ground to the slightly dense woods nearby, away from any source of light.
He wasn’t the first to lift a hand on Ainsley and bide his time on earth goodbye. There had been two before him—one was her boyfriend and the other was her boss in a frat club where she used to work in Melbourne. Although it should be a good thing that she was getting punished by someone other than me, but I had sent them to hell with a silly excuse of how I should be the only man to torture her, and not because it made me angry at all.
But I think I’ve been wrong all along.
I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to dismiss it as some half-conscious rambling, as though she hadn’t meant what she said—that she came back for me. No. For the last five years, I’d convinced myself that she didn’t care, that when I slipped over that cliff, she had seen an opportunity to discard me, and ran to save herself without a second thought.
And perhaps, a part of me had accepted that. I’d always known I’d give up my life for hers. But not like that—not without knowing she felt even a fraction of what I felt for her. That was the part that burned. Not her leaving, but that she didn’t hesitate. It made me feel like I was something she could easily shrug off. She didn’t have to care, didn’t have to stay—but she didn’t have to erase me either.
When I slipped and fell into the water and hit my head on the rock in it, I thought it was over. I didn’t wake up for a year. A whole year gone in a coma, my life on pause. And when I did finally open my eyes, I found out she had moved on, graduated, gone to college like nothing ever happened. Like I hadn’t been hanging off that cliff because of her. What crushed me even more was that there had been no police report, no missing person alert—nothing. She’d told no one. Not her friends, not the authorities. It was as if I’d never existed, like she was trying to wipe me out of everyone’s memory.
That was why I started it—the sabotage, the torment. If she didn’t want me in her life, then I’d make damn sure to force myself into it.
But now... now she said she came back? That she cared enough to return?
No. She had been sleep-talking. She had to be. Because God knew if she hadn’t, I had ruined her life for nothing. And she might never forgive or want to look at me again, and fuck if that wasn’t topping the list of the scariest things that could happen to me.
“What do you want from me? What did I do to you?” Hudson cried as I dumped him when we were far enough from the club.
“I want your life. Is that enough to answer your question?” I crouched beside him, barely making out his face in the dark. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were few. Bringing out a torch would be the same as begging to be caught attemptinga murder. On the plus side, he was lucky I couldn’t see his face because the imprints he left on Ainsley’s face still churned in the back of my eyes.
“Who sent you? The boss sent you, didn’t he? I told him I’ll pay him his money! I just need a little more time after some bitch fucked up a contract I—”
There went my self control and gloved fist flying into his face. I didn’t stop at one punch, I delivered six more, each blow carrying a tidbit of the fury stuffing my chest.
“She poured coffee on you accidentally and you think you have every right to hit her,” I said after the last punch.
It took a while to get himself to speak, his speech distorted by something that could only be blood. “You shot a fucking dart at my dick because I hit a girl who deserved it? Who the fuck are you?” I sensed anger. He had the strength to be angry.
“Who the fuck am I?” Reaching for my bag, I replied to him. “I’m hers. And that girl you think deserved it, she’s mine. Tell me, do you know what ‘mine’ means?”
I picked out eight acupuncture needles, keeping one between my thumb and forefinger. Being someone with vast knowledge of the human body, I knew exactly what a sexy little needle could do when used right...or wrong. Acupuncture was supposed to be therapeutic, used to promote blood flow and ease pain—at least, that was the polite version. But there was a darker side to it. Inserted the wrong way, these needles could do more than just relax muscles—they could make them freeze.
A poorly placed needle in the wrong spot could stop blood from flowing entirely, locking the muscles in place and leaving a person paralysed, conscious but unable to move, like a puppet with its strings cut, as if their body had somehow forgotten how to move. The blood trapped, the nerves screaming, the entire body fighting for movement that would never come. If that pressure wasn’t relieved in time, the person wouldn’t justbe frozen—they’d die, slowly. So fucking slowly. And they’d feel every agonising second of it.
