“Okay.” He laughed, unconvinced. “Besides, if you didn’t come to my house wearing this dress we wouldn’t be here.” Then he inched back, spat in his hand, and palmed my pussy. I closed my eyes, letting my head fall back on his shoulder as two fingers pushed inside me.
He inched away, grabbed my hip, and dragged his thick head across my center before prodding my entrance. Then he exhaled, a sigh of relief, as he sank inside me. I held my breath from the pressure, and his palm met the wall in front of me.
“Holy fuck,” he moaned, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Why do I do this to myself?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling the man I hated most inside my body.
“I get off on the deprivation.” He dragged himself out. “I hold back until I can’t fucking take it anymore.” He sank back in. “Because it makes everything feel ten times better.” He inched out, then thrust hard. “Why must torture both pain me and give me pleasure?”
Why must we be more similar than I desire?
Why must he share what’s on his mind?
He pulled down the front of my dress and grabbed my breast.
Another rugged moan escaped him. “Fuck, we have five minutes.”
I pinned my gaze to the clock on the left of the small room, watching it tick by as he took me against the wall. I focused on the second hand, the rest of the world fading away, the ticking marching to the sounds of his heavy breathing in my ear each time he pumped into me.
At times, if I closed my eyes, I could imagine Kane as someone different. Someone with the single-minded goal of pleasing me, adoring me, wanting to kiss me while inside me. Never mind a gentle prince sweeping me off my feet in one night. Instead, what I truly wanted to know after sleeping with the same person for seven years, was how it felt to make love to someone. I didn’t know if sex was supposed to feel differently than this. But I knew that it had to because each time he plunged himself inside of me, I repeatedly ached for this feeling I’d never experienced before. One I grieved but always been denied of.
While the discreet room we were in next to the chamber filled with the heady and arousing mockery of us, the walls closed in on me, and a scream piled in my lungs. Not a scream of pleasure but a scream of anger and sorrow.
But I didn’t scream at all.
I stood there, watching the clock, unblinking as my eyes glossed over.
Kane’s hand moved to my shoulder, breaking me from the stare, and I chanced a look back. His weary eyes were lowered, focusing on watching himself enter me from behind. A faded bruise colored his right eye and jawline, and a cut split his bottom lip, most likely a punishment from his father’s heavy fist. However, no matter how many bruises marked his face or how visibly tired he was from the Panic, Kane was disgustingly handsome.
But none of this mattered to me. Kane was the source of all my anger.
Since I was sixteen, I’d suffered through every sexual encounter to be close to him. This gave me the opportunity to rid this coven and town of the one who brought my family and me into a life of misery.
In only two more months, I would kill theprinceof Weeping Hollow.
On the night of the Crimson Eclipse, Kane Pruitt would be dead.
Each time he fucked me, if I wasn’t fantasizing about a dreamt-up man, I was fantasizing about slitting his throat. In my mind, I could see my reflection dancing inside the stainless steel of my box cutter. Perhaps I’d use my precious dagger, or even Kane’s knife. I imagined it would be worse if he realized I was usinghisblade to kill him—if he recognized the engraving of his initials in the steel before it happened or while it was happening. Either way, I would lie there next to him after he fucked me for the last time, warm blood soaking into white sheets and watching life float from his hazel eyes. And once he was dead, Mom would awaken from her catatonic spell, and this evil stirring inside me would finally leave me for good.
It all started when I first found him in my living room all those years ago. The brown-haired boy was the hue of fall, embodying Mom’s tragic end, my vengeance to bring her back, and her awaiting justice. Throughout the years, I remained close to him, threatening any girl standing in my way of this plan, including Fallon when she first arrived in Weeping Hollow.
A heartless friendship with him had been my only chance to get close enough for him to blindly trust me without manipulating my thoughts, as the Pruitt men were capable of doing.
If I couldn’t take Mom outside of this town to break Kane’s hex, then I wanted to live a liberated life within it. One where he was dead, and she was awake. And once he was dead, no other would endure the same fate.
It amazed me how desperate I had become. The passing years only fueled the fury, leading a life with an ambition to kill a man. The one whom I had allowed to steal my innocence. The one who I’d given pieces to, and the one who’d scooped me hollow.
And if I made the wrong move, the one who could steal my life as well.
Footsteps echoed just outside the door as members of Sacred Sea retreated to the chamber under the Pruitt Mansion.
“It’s two,” I edged out. “The coven will be wondering why we’re late.”
Kane leaned back, holding my dress up with one hand, holding my hip with the other. He pounded into me until his thrusts slowed, body seized by an intoxicating force.
After all these years, I knew his body language as well as the tide, and on cue, he pulled out, coating my backside with his climax. I dropped my forehead to the wall, and it didn’t take long before the sound of his bucklejingledas he pulled up his pants.
“Moment of truth.” His breath was shredded. “I bet it’ll be a meeting to remember.”
