“We couldn’t have that.” I shrugged, but pulled her closer. “The disrespect, that he thought you were so much trash to throw away.”
“He wasn’t worthy to fuck your sweet body.”
“And he didn’t want to keep you.”
“So we removed the choice of his poisonous intent and replaced it with pain,” Key finished his epitaph.
Her head swiveled between us, her hand dropping slightly. I sucked in the breath she let out, savoring the air like it was my last. My little Alice held my gaze, watchful, unmoving.
“You did this for me?”
Key caught her wrist, pressing a brutal kiss there, biting her skin hard enough to mark but not break her flesh, then licked the inside of her palm soothingly. Her fingers curled up, tracing the archer’s bow of his lips that mirrored mine. I touched myown mouth, moaning at the caress Ialmostfelt first hand as her breath hitched.
“He was going to throw me away for others to rape?” she whispered, staring between us, understandingfinallywhat we did for her.
What we had done for the past weeks. Horror stretched her stunning, ethereal features, and her deep breaths came shallow and short as she swayed between us on unsteady feet.
I clasped her face between my cold hands, her heat warming me from the outside in. “He was. But we prevented that, and now you are here with us.” My words were fierce, the light in my eyes more than obsessive.
I knew what I looked like as the same light was reflected in my brother’s face, like rapture as I watched her face intently, knowing her choice in this moment was the one that would define her future.
A cage, like Key wanted.
Freedom, and be hunted to appease my devil.
She held my gaze and pressed forward until her lips brushed mine.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HELIA
My breath shuddered in the infinitely minute space between our lips. Kash froze, his strange, almost purple eyes in the odd lighting between night and faintly reflected street light boring through me. Rainwater dripped down his cheek, streaking the blood spattered across his pale flesh.
A breath. That’s all the reprieve I earned from their hunger before his mouth slammed into mine, crushing my body between theirs.
Fingers and hands that belonged to both of them wandered over my skin, their dual touch sweet and discovering at first but quickly devolving into gripping and tearing. The twins snarled over my flesh, sucking and licking and biting.
My body ached between them, months of forced deprivation–fromthem,because ofthem–bereft of touch and contact with any other human, anyone at all, left me a needy mess, desperate for anything they offered.
They killed for me.
A sacrifice gifted me on an altar of gravel and shattered glass.
The thought should have been abhorrent. I should have run screaming from them, ripped my hands from their grasp, found the nearest safe house and phone, and dialed 911.
I did nothing like that.
The strange thing about attending Rippton U was that we were all the same. Our families were wealthy enough to bend any law, hell, even break them. Sad to say, I could count my own parents in that quarter. This wasn’t my first body.
That happened when I was ten years old, prepubescent and crushing on Randy Grower, the boy of the moment in the fifth grade. I came home, hoping for one of Mom’s special hot chocolates and a goss sesh. Instead, I found myself holding plastic garbage bags, with oversized rubber gloves to my armpits, playing a macabre version of Tetris with human limbs as my mother hacked away on the kitchen floor, identity forever unknown because it didn’t matter.
I earned my special hot chocolate that day for the first time.
And many times after.
The knowledge I was about to be fucked between a pair of psychotic albino identical twins with a killer habit wasn’t such a far stretch.
