Yet right now, with a gun in my mouth, it’s all I can see.
There was a closet.
Is it my hand, reaching out to twist the knob?
Storm leans closer. His scent surrounds me and my stomach tenses.
His lips hit the shell of my ear. “What is it you think I did to you, Lydia Flynn?” He pushes the gun further.
My lip stings and I think he’ll split it.
“Tell me so I can beg for your forgiveness.”
My heart hammers harder in my chest.
I don’t understand this game, and I thought I’d seen them all.
He shoves the weapon in further and my gag reflex activates to keep me safe, my stomach convulsing and my body lifting up, but he uses his elbow on my sternum to drive me back down.
Despite the fact I anticipated it, I didn’t actually think he was capable of this type of violence, and I don’t know why. Everyone should be assumed fully able and willing to commit the worst offense against you. That type of mindset keeps you protected.
I underestimated him because he’s not on my level. I assumed him a lesser wolf.
“Tell me so I can make amends or tell me so I can fucking kill you. I’ve already gotten a taste for it. You think you know me,Lydia, but you have no idea what I can do. If I wanted, I could watch you drown in a teaspoon of water and smile as I forced your nose and your mouth upon it. So when I take this gun from your pretty lips, you should start talking, or you’ll see all the things you assumed I could never be.”
How did he know my assumptions?
What are you now?
I want to ask, but I can’t speak.
Not yet.
I stay still, waiting for him to pull the gun from the back of my fucking throat.
I know he’s going to die, and I know I’m going to do it, but right now, we’re playing his game.
Not forever.
Not for long.
Slowly, after too many heartbeats in my head, he starts to pull the gun from my throat. He shifts to watch as he does it, my saliva coating the weapon, strings of it connecting me to the Glock. His eyes feel hungry, but not sexual. Deadly.
I taste iron from my top lip and I know it’s bleeding but I don’t look away from him and I don’t flinch, no matter how slow he goes.
When I can gulp down air from my throat again, the smallest ache of relief flutters through me and I hate he’s made me feel that way.
I still don’t move.
I don’t even blink.
He traces my lips once more, the cut stinging bright as he does, but then the gun is away from my mouth and I’m thinking of headbutting him, just to pay him back a little before I can pay him back fully with the price of his death, when a shot cracks off in the dark, beyond the car.
We both flinch, but neither of us move, not at first.
Our eyes are locked on one another.
We wait to see if it was an errant bullet. A hunter roaming the woods illegally, maybe a bastard looking for a wolf to kill.
