Chapter 79
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
BELLATRIX
Ipushed Casper back a step and shoved past him, stomping towards the door. I shook my head and cursed. I could hear the fucker following at my heels.
Actually, I couldn’t hear anything besides the clanking of glasses, hushed voices, and the odd cackle clamoring over all of it—the one rich folks made when they were dishing out insults and calling it humor.
But I could feel him.
I didn’t stop to check where Gabby and Vee had wondered off to as I weaved my way between drunk partygoers and the sober people serving them.
This was meant to be neutral ground, even though this house had been far from neutral over the years, so I was confident they were fine wherever they went. I just needed to get out of here.
“Where you going?” Casper called after me when I made it to the bottom of the stone steps at the front of the house.
I kicked off my shoes and picked them up by their straps as I aimed a glare in his direction. “I’m leaving.”
He grabbed my arm and twisted me around to face him. “Okay, let’s leave. Where do you wanna go, babe?”
I tried to yank my arm free and he held on to it tighter. “Nope. Ut-uh. I’m leaving to get away from you,” I hissed.
“Okay.” He shrugged. “Let’s get away from me together.”
“You don’t get it, do you? None of this is cute. Or funny.” I waved my free hand up and down the length of his body. “I fucking hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?” He dropped my arm and tucked his hands into his pockets. He didn’t move back though, forcing me to peer up at him. At the way the moonlight had him looking like he had a halo around his light hair when there should have been a pair of horns sticking out of it.
“Why what?” I’d heard him. I just didn’t understand what he wasn’t understanding. It always amazed me how grown-ass men had this way of turning into little boys on the playground who suddenly got their feelings hurt. As if some part of their brains never quite developed once they hit puberty.
“Why do you hate me?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You crossed the line. You hurt me, and you have no intention of apologizing about it, do you?”
“I’m not sorry. You want me to lie to you and tell you that I am?” When I didn’t answer him, he grinned. “Pain reminds us we’re alive. Pleasure reminds us we want to be.” He lifted a shoulder before dropping it down again. “Besides, you like hurting me too. It’s kinda our thing, babe.”
“We don’t have a thing, Casper. We will never have a thing.”
“You’re wrong.” He took another step closer so that we were standing toe to toe.
I arched my feet on the cold pavement, ready to grab any number of the weapons I had on my person, or make a run for it if I needed to.
He tugged my head back by my ponytail and leaned over me. “You enjoyed yourself. You liked digging that knife into my back, closing your fingers around my throat until you could feel me stop breathing. And you loved how you got to do it over and over again. You loved using me. Admit it.”
I shook my head, and he let go of my hair and squeezed my cheeks. Forcing me to nod with him.
“Yes, you did. You got what you wanted out of me. Just like I got what I wanted out of you. It was an even trade.”
“How? How was what you did to me even close to anything I did to you? I never held you down. I never forced you—”
He cut me off by grabbing my lips between two fingers and pinching them closed.
“Penetration is penetration, sweetheart. You shot me. Stabbed me. But I can’t fuck you in the ass?
” He paused but he didn’t let go of my mouth.
He didn’t really want an answer. “No matter how you try to justify it to yourself, what you did to me ain’t any different from what I did to you. We’re the same.”
He lowered his hand, and I spit blood at his feet. I had been so pissed off I’d chewed a hole in my own cheek. “I’m nothing like you.”
“You’re worse,” he countered at the same time I finished with, “I’m better.”
Then I reached through the slit in my pantsuit, grabbing the pouch I had attached to my thigh, and drew out the taser Gabby and I had spent the last few days modifying.
I didn’t give Casper a chance to react before I was sending enough electricity into his chest to take down an elephant, or in this instance, stop a human heart from beating.
“Zero,” I whispered into the night air.
His eyes widened and he was able to get out one word as he collapsed to his knees and then curled up on his side. “Alice.”
“What about her?” I was quick to ask, but he didn’t look like he was breathing anymore. I tossed the taser aside and jumped on top of him, straddling his waist as I gripped up the lapels of his tux jacket. “What about Alice?”
He didn’t move.
“Fuck.” I positioned my hands over his chest and started doing compressions. My arms nearly giving out and my interest giving up when he finally fluttered his lashes open. “Now it’s an even trade,” I grunted.
He took in a shuttering breath. And then he took three more.
“What about Alice?” I repeated.
“She’s alive,” he huffed.
“No, she’s not.”
“Yes, she is.”
“I saw her myself,” I reminded him.
“Did ya see her pull… the trigger…?” A wheeze and a cough.
I didn’t reply because we both knew the answer.
I hadn’t seen my sister blow her own brains out.
Just the aftermath. The blood on the walls and ceiling.
The dress and necklace she’d been wearing.
What was left of her hair sticking to bits of her skull and her feet positioned out in front of her, like a porcelain doll someone had dropped on its head and shattered into a million pieces…
My hand slipped into my pocket to rub my keychain. It came up empty. I didn’t have my keys on me. They were back at the house, locked in a safe I didn’t have a code to and wasn’t so dumb as to try to pry open.
“Don’t believe me…? Ask Vee,” Casper grunted. Then he threw his head back on the concrete and closed his eyes. He was still breathing, though. He just looked like he wasn’t.