ONE
STARLING
“Are you fucking serious?”I question, pinning my shaking hands firmly to my hips so Sebastian won’t see how much this has shaken me, as I look from my asshole husband to the crowd of suit-wearing behemoths standing in our driveway.
“Completely,” he answers, his eyes hard and shrewd and coldly focused on me.
Furious tears prickle at the backs of my eyes, but I will them away. I won’t cry over the absence of his soft gaze on me, not now. Not when what I’m assuming is the entire team of invisible ninjas that have been following me for years are very visibly outside waiting for me.
Sucking in an attempt at a calming breath, I exhale and then speak. “I accept that your psycho, control freak ways mean that I have a security team following me. I accept that you implanted a tracker in my skin. Honestly, I don’t even mind it that much, because your insanity and that tracker saved me from being raped. Jesus, Sebastian, I even accept that you’re an obsessive, possessive psychopath. But this,” I shriek, my voice having gotten louder and louder with each word as I point toward the group of men outside. “This is too much.”
Instead of reacting, Sebastian’s expression stays inscrutable, without even a twitch of a muscle to show me my words are having an impact. I hate him like this. I hate that when I feel like I’m unraveling, he’s so immovable…untouched by my distress.
“Sebastian,” I rasp, my voice breaking as I lose control in my attempt to stay calm.
“Your security team is for your protection,” he says, like that should be obvious, like I’m the one that’s overreacting.
“And why can’t they provide that protection invisibly, the way they’ve been doing it for years?” I question, hating how desperate I sound.
For the first time I see a chink as his expressionless armor cracks a little. Only instead of the guilt or understanding I’m hoping for, he smirks. It’s little more than a twitch of his lips, but I see it, and my stomach clenches.
Instead of hardness, when he looks at me, it’s smug triumph in his gaze. “I understand that this change in your security protocol might have come as a shock. So if you’d prefer, I’m more than happy to speak to Dean Livingstone and arrange for you to finish your degree online,” he offers magnanimously, like he’s doing me a favor.
“This is insane. You’re insane,” I say quietly, looking at him, then motioning through the window to the ridiculous black suit and sunglasses-clad team of commandos. “You’ve lost it,” I declare, unsure if I want to cry or scream or to run as fast and as far away from my crazy husband as possible.
Sighing, like my reaction is annoying him, Sebastian takes a step closer to me. “You’ve never had an issue with your security before, they’ve been ensuring your safety since you were sixteen. I don’t understand the problem,” he says, deliberately oblivious, and making it sound like I’m the one being unreasonable.
My anger surges to the surface, smashing through my attempts at control. “The problem,” I hiss, stepping back andmotioning again to the crowd of wannabe Secret Service agents in the driveway, “is that I’ve been willing to tolerate having security, because even though I knew they were there, I’ve never seen them. The problem,” I snarl angrily, “is that all of a sudden you’ve decided that I need to take a team of seven-foot fucking Neanderthals to school with me like I’m Taylor Swift and not just married to a crazy person.”
My husband thrives on power. Especially over me. He likes to control me, and right now he’s enjoying this. He’s toying with me, and from the excited gleam in his eyes, I’m doing exactly what he expected me to do.
The rational side of my brain is screaming at me to retreat. To step back and to try to figure out what his endgame is, but before I can, he says, “There was an attack on campus last month.”
“That wasn’t an attack, one of the valet parking staff got into a fight with an asshole student,” I scoff.
“Youwere attacked on campus,” he reminds me, his expression animalistic as he closes the distance between us again.
“I was attacked at a party, not in broad daylight, and that asshole was arrested and kicked out of school,” I remind him. “I’m not in any danger, Sebastian, and we both know it. The goons standing outside right now have nothing to do with keeping me safe and everything to do with you making sure that I can’t disappear, and we both know that.”
“I’d never let you go,” he snarls, his eyes glowing with intensity as he prowls another step closer. A predator with his prey in sight.
Shaking my head, I close my eyes. When I open them again, I capture his gaze with mine, needing him to see the sincerity in my words. “Sebastian. I’m not leaving you. I’m not running away or disappearing. This paranoia is all in your head.” Thisisn’t the first time I’ve said these words to him. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve told him over and over in a hundred different ways that even though he’s insane, I’m not going anywhere. But it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I reassure him; he doesn’t believe me.
I know that I’m the cause of his fear and worry. Months ago, I helped my friend Bunny run from her husband—my pseudo brother-in-law—Hunter. I gave hermyescape plan. I gave hermygo-bag. I gave her all the moneyI’dsaved to start a new life if I ever decided to leave Sebastian. I gave her everything she needed to be free of this life that I never had a choice in being dragged into.
Loving Sebastian isn’t a choice for me. He forced his way into my world when I was only sixteen years old, and every action I’ve taken since then has been affected by him in one way or another. He and his friends broke me, and even though I glued myself back together again, a part of me will always wonder who I’d be right now if he’d looked past me instead of claiming me the very first time he saw me.
But I’m not sixteen, and I’m not his prisoner anymore. Being with him and marrying him was a choice I made for myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to who he is or who the men he considers his brothers are. I’m who I am because I survived them, but I promised myself I’d never allow them to do to another person what they did to me.
So, when I realized that instead of learning from the mistakes and hurt Sebastian inflicted on me, Hunter was doubling down and behaving like every bit the monster I know him capable of being. I lost it.
I gathered up all the things I’ve learned from surviving for years in their world, and I turned it on them. I gave them a dose of their own medicine, and for the very first time since I met them all, I stuck first. I didn’t play defense; I fired the first shot,and I got a direct hit. I just didn’t realize that my marriage would be the biggest casualty of the war.
“I’ll never let you leave me, Little Bird,” Sebastian rasps, his voice so cold and feral, a chill rushes over my skin. “I’d find you, Starling. You might think you could get free of me, but I’d hunt you to the ends of the earth. I’d never stop searching. I’d never give up. I’d stalk you to the very depths of hell and I’d drag you back, because there’s nowhere you could go that I wouldn’t follow. You’re mine, Little Bird, and I’ll never let you go.”
I don’t know when he moved, but suddenly he’s so close I can feel the heat of his breath on my skin as he threatens me in so seductive a tone that it makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.
The normal, rational parts of me know I shouldn’t taunt him, because I know that his fear of losing me is what’s making him behave like a crazy person, but I can’t help it. Sebastian and I have always brought out the worst in each other. Since the first time he saw me, his obsessive need for control has stifled and overwhelmed me. We’ve been fighting, running, and chasing each other for years, but somehow, we always end up together at the end, in our fucked-up version of happy ever after.
