There’s no way out.
My scalpel is long gone.
We’re outnumbered.
This is it.
Furious, I spit his charm out to spite him.
“I hate you,” I growl, while my soaked pussy calls me a liar. “Hate your gift. Go to hell.”
“Quiet,” Knox snaps.
I want to snarl at him, to tell him to go to hell again, but the moment we hit the stairs, the words die on my tongue.
My guilt strangles me better than any gag ever could.
Any second now, I’m going to see Bronwyn.
My broken, tortured sister.
I’ll have to look her in the eye, knowing I came while she suffered.
Oh God. What have I done?
What have I become?
“There you are, Son.”
Knox doesn’t answer, only grabs my legs tighter. Being protective.
Protective? What the hell am I thinking? He doesn’t care about me.
“Skylar!” Easton’s voice slices through the air, desperate and raw. “Skylar! Help!”
The sound reminds me of what matters. Bronwyn. Easton. The three of us making it out alive. We’ll escape this place together. We have to.
I tell myself I won’t miss Knox once I’m free. Maybe there’ll be a hollow space where the illusion he spun used to be, but that’s all.
But then he lowers me to the ground, his hands skilled and sure as he flips me to face them. My foolish body betrays me all over again.
I lean into his side, toward the least dangerous Colbert in the room. When he drapes an arm over me, gripping my bicep, I tell myself it’s survival.
Ridiculous.
Knox isn’t safe. None of these people is.
Jett and Papa, these monsters, glare at me.
Jett has his hand clamped like a shackle around Easton’s arm.
Papa, that bastard, has Bronwyn by the back of her neck.
Urine has left a wet trail down the inside of her leg and gathered at her feet.
Somehow, that isn’t even the worst of it.
My mouth fills with the taste of metal as I take in her cracked fingernails. The blood dripping from her nose, soaking into the front of her gray nightgown.
