He might have been bigger than me, but I was much,muchmore psychopathic.
I let him rape me, forcing myself not to struggle, fighting through my own pain, gathering my strength, waiting until he was distracted by his orgasm. Then I tore free and turned on him like a rabid animal.
I broke his orbital socket first.
Then his nose, then his jaw.
He was still breathing when I wrapped my hands around his throat. Still trying to speak, to plead, blood bubbling between his lips.
He stopped breathing three minutes later.
I held on for several minutes more, just in case.
I watched the light leave his eyes, and I felt no guilt. No horror. Just the satisfaction that this man who tried to take something from me would never take anything from anyone again.
He was the second life I took.
The first doesn’t bear thinking about. Not tonight.
In the hours and days that followed his death, as I scrubbed his blood from under my fingernails and read about his body being discovered in the papers, I realized I wasn’t disgusted by what I’d done.
I was disgusted by what I’dwanted.
By the part of me that had followed him willingly. That had wanted to be touched, to be desired, to be claimed by him.
By a man.
It took years to untangle the shame from the survival. To understand that my attraction to men wasn’t the sickness—he was.
Years.
I just shoved that truth down Kai’s throat…and then mocked him for choking on it.
“Bastian.”
I realize I’ve been staring at the wall, my hand still pressed to my wounded cheek.
“What?” I grate.
“I’m going to fetch Kai.” She’s already moving toward the door. “And you’re going to apologize to him for being such a fucking asshole.”
I scoff. “I’m not going to?—“
“You are.” She pauses at the door, her hand on the handle, glaring at me with eyes like a goddamn blowtorch. “He deserves an apology.”
I want to remind her I’m not the kind of man who apologizes. That contrition is a weakness, and pity a sin.
Instead, I hear myself say, “And if he doesn’t want to come back?”
Her eyes harden even more. “Then I guess you’ll be questioning your life choices.” Cold air rushes in when she pulls open the door. “Alone.”
The door swings shut behind her, and I’m left standing in the mausoleum surrounded by the wreckage of the evening—blood on the granite, the shattered lamp’s oil pooling onto the floor, the lingering scent of sex and violence.
“Your friends will never abandon you,”Bad Wolf says.
“They don’t count,”Good Wolf whines mournfully.“They’re evil, all of them.”
I lean over the sarcophagus, my head dropping into my hands.
