It was like she’d channeled all of the hurt and frustration of our lives into that grip. She’d been so insistent during my Initiation that I feel her pain, and now, I understood exactly what she meant.
“I asked you a question.” She growled, shoving me farther into the room. “Do. You. See. Me?”
I nodded tearily, my words failing me completely. It was impossible to string a coherent thought together through the horror show looping in my mind. Dom’s face now, and a younger her covered in blood. This bedroom now, and the nights I’d spent terrified hiding under the bed. My mother, always absent, always dragging me down with her.
But Dom’s voice cut through all of the noise as she snarled in my face. “You can never just listen, can you?”
Before I knew it, my back was up against a wall, my arm pinned in place by her iron grip. “I told you to leave here that first night, just like I told you to leave as a kid. I tried tospareyou. Why don’t you ever just fucking listen?”
Her face hardly looked human anymore. Her demons had taken over. “The last thing anyone needed her was some dumb fucking kid wandering into trouble. You think I didn’t have enough on my plate to worry about without protecting you too, Kiera? Do you have any idea the sacrifices I made?”
I shut my eyes, turning my head away from her as her hot breath washed over my neck. I wasn’t worried that she’d kick me to the streets anymore. Now, I worried she’d fucking kill me.
“Answer me!” A fist slammed into the wall beside my head, cracking the dry wall as she pulled in ragged breaths.
I whimpered, fighting to find the words that would save my life. But before things could escalate, footsteps pounded down the hallway: Spencer and Leo.
As they bounded through the doorway, they were still breathless and sweaty from their trip outside. And from the furrow of their brows, clearly they were confused by the noise coming from back here.
I’d guess they hadn’t been in this part of the house either — not often at least. And based on Spencer’s expression, this haunted mausoleum wasn’t what they’d been expecting after all of Dom’s cageyness.
But there wasn’t a single question asked before their eyes locked onto Dom’s grip on my arm. Spence moved to me as Leo charged on Dom.
“What did I fucking tell you?” Leo growled. But she barely had to lay a finger on Dom to move her. The second Leo andSpencer entered the room, it was like Dom had acquired a new target.
She whipped around to face them, seething with rage. “You never should have left her alone. How the fuck did this happen?”
“You need to calm the fuck down,” Spencer grumbled, scanning over me to assess how much damage Dom had done.
Her voice just drew Dom’s vitriol back in my direction, though. “You violated a direct order. The only real rule I fucking gave you. If you think what I did to you in the shop was bad?—”
But before she could make good on her threat, Dom’s phone chimed in her pocket.
For a second, the very air in the room froze. And as those icy blue eyes flicked over the text on her screen, I thought she might just throw her phone straight through the wall. “Are you fucking serious?!”
Closing her eyes, Dom forced a deep breath through her clenched teeth. Then she opened them again, giving me one last terrifying glare before she stormed toward the door. “I have to go.”
I blinked at her retreating back, shaking from adrenaline as I tried to process what was happening.
Leo seemed to share my confusion. “Are you serious? Where the fuck are you going?”
“Don’t let her out of your sight again, or I swear to god, there’ll be hell to pay.”
And with that, Dom was gone, abandoning me in the graveyard of my childhood with more questions than I’d come here with.
38
KIERA
Dom’sheavy footsteps echoed down the hallway like the pounding of my own heart. But as she slipped away, the hammering didn’t stop. Instead, the pressure in my chest grew, cutting off my thoughts along with any air left in the room.
In the silence that followed, my saviors just watched me while I watched the door. No one had any clue what to do. But if we stayed silent for long enough, maybe it would feel like nothing had happened at all.
It was Leo who cleared her throat first, shattering my foolish hope along with the silence. “...What the fuck happened?”
I opened my mouth, grasping for the words and failing again to find them. Panic had only accelerated my flashbacks from a smattering of memories into a dizzying supercut of horrors.
The rage I’d seen on Dom’s face as she pinned me against the wall wasn’t all that different from the rage on her face the night I left.
