Chapter Nineteen
Kytten
Cash was seeing a therapist.
I didn’t know how to feel about that. What would happen when he found out about the monsters? Would he force me to see her too? I didn’t need a fucking shrink.
I needed my brother.
I needed someone to want me.
Cash said he wanted me. But did he really? Or was I just a replacement for the woman he lost?
My eyes scrunched up, closing tight. They were stirring again. I could feel them. Tiny little squiggles under my skin. Letting me know they were hungry.
I scratched at my legs. I had thirty minutes before I needed to leave to meet him. I had skipped Trudy’s this morning. My appetite nonexistent.
The monsters woke when I got back to the motel. They never let me go to bed without feeding them first.
What surprised me was how silent they were around Cash. They didn’t pester me for blood. They didn’t hold back the emotions. They were silent. Almost as if they had left.
They never left though. I knew they were biding their time. Letting me feel things I hadn’t felt in years just so they could show me how much I needed them.
That’s what happened when I got back to my room. Everything came crashing down and I couldn’t handle it. My heart was racing so fast that I thought it might give out.
Four cuts.
That’s what it took to appease them. Four cuts for the four hours I spent with Cash on the mountain.
It was a small price to pay. I had plenty of blood and my body made more all the time. I would never run out.
As long as they didn’t keep demanding more.
When I made it to the mountain, Cash was waiting. The smile on his face when he saw me made all the cuts, all the pain, and all the blood worth it.
He smiled like he was happy I was here.
“Hi,” I said. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck.
“Come here.” Cash grabbed my hand and pulled me to him. His lips descending on mine in a rush.
His large hands cradled my head as he leaned over and kissed me. My mouth opened for him and his tongue brushed mine. He didn’t let up.
“I want you so fucking much, Rose.”
I want you, too!
His lips made a path down my neck and he added, “I want to bury my tongue in your pussy until you’re screaming my name.” My body shivered against him as he continued, “Then I want to bury my cock deep inside you and never leave.”
“Cash,” I moaned.
Before I knew it, his hands were under my shirt. His thumbs grazed my nipples, and my body shuddered.
“Do you want me to make you come, baby?”
“Yes,” I breathed. I wanted him so fucking bad.
I wanted to feel his hands everywhere. Squeezing me, caressing me.
I wanted to feel his hands run up the inside of my legs and part my thighs.
.. but when his hands went to my jeans, I remembered the scars.
It was so easy to forget the monsters and what they demanded from me when I was in his arms.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, searching my eyes.
“Nothing. I thought we were going to talk.”
“You’re right,” he sighed. How long would he wait? How long could I put him off from discovering my secret? How long could I resist the way he made me feel, the way he made me forget?
He watched me for any hint of a reason to why I stopped him again. I stopped him every time he got a little too close. He wouldn’t wait forever. And eventually I would have to make a decision.
Tell him the truth.
Or leave him.
Neither option appealed to me.
“Did someone widen the path?” I asked, quickly diverting his attention away from my body.
“Yea, I sent the prospects up here to cut them back. I don’t want anything to cause you pain.”
He was too fucking sweet. He would never understand that I needed the pain. The pain was a way for me to feel. To let the monsters scream.
“Come on. I want to talk to you about something.”
He pulled me over to the rock and sat down, pulling me down with him. He fit me against his chest and wrapped his arms around me like a cocoon. I felt safe here. Just him and me. No one else to break the spell around us.
“I spoke to Ryder this morning.”
I gasped and tried to sit up, but he held me tight. “Stay with me,” he whispered, and my mind answered, ‘forever.’
“How did it go?”
“Better than I expected. He knew about you.”
I stiffened in his grasp.
“It’s ok,” Cash insisted. But it wasn’t ok. Someone knew about us. Had someone followed us up here? Was someone watching me? Or Him?
“He wants to meet you.”
“Why?”
“Because Rachel was his best friend.”
“And he wants to know if I’m good enough for you,” I reasoned, despair filling my chest. But the monsters stayed sleeping.
“No, Rosie. He wants to make sure I’m good enough for you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. He knows nothing about me.” This time when I turned, he let me. “Why wouldn’t you be good enough for me?”
“Because I’m an asshole.”
I snorted. “No, you aren’t,” I said, settling back against his chest. “Believe me, I’ve met assholes.”
His arms tightened around me, and he hissed, “What assholes?”
“Cash, you know what the Nyght Nymphs do. You know who we help. Every person we help has an asshole in their life that we rescue them from.”
“Like Amber?” he asked quietly.
“I wasn’t involved in Amber’s rescue. I told you; I’ve never met her.” Amber wasn’t a topic I was ready to discuss. I squirmed against him and he took the hint and changed the subject.
“How did you get your road name?” he asked, and I smiled.
I took a deep breath. I knew this was coming. Knew he would eventually ask about my past.
“Val found me screaming behind a dumpster when I was eleven years old. She said I reminded her of a lost kitten.” I shrugged as if it didn’t really mean anything. But it meant everything to me.
“Where was your family?” he rasped. I heard the anger in his voice, so I placed my hands on his thighs and rubbed up and down. It didn’t take long before he relaxed.
“I can’t have you getting angry about my past. Nothing can be done about it now.” I looked over my shoulder. “Ok?”
He gazed into my eyes, ping ponging back and forth, looking for something. It felt like he was always searching. But I didn’t know what he was searching for.
“I’ll try.”
With my head on his chest, I told him about my brother. How our mom left one day and we were on our own. I told him about how Thorne disappeared and why. And how I ended up behind that dumpster for Valhalla to find.
“What happened to the guy?” he asked, his voice tight with what I assumed was anger. Maybe rage with the way his arms tightened around me.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It was the only time I ever saw Val kill someone.” My voice was barely a whisper as I remembered the blood that dripped from the gash in his neck. His lifeless eyes staring at me under the dumpster as I lay there shaking.
Val told me to close my eyes when she pulled me out. She didn’t want me to see the dead man lying on the ground. To this day, she didn’t know I saw him. She didn’t know that I knew what she did.
For me.
My eyes watered and my nose burned. I waited for the itch, but it never came. Neither did the tears.
The tears never breeched the surface. They pooled in my eyes, taunting me with their release. Always on the edge until they disappeared again saying, ‘not this time, sucker.’
“What happened after that?”
I sniffed and took a breath. “Val took me home, and I became a Nyght Nymph.”
“What about your brother?”
“Val thinks he’s dead,” I answered, turning my head to the side and looking out over the town. I wanted to crawl inside Cash and hide from everything. He felt safe.
He felt like home.
That was something I hadn’t felt since before my mom left. It was something I wanted to cling to... to him and never let go. But I had my secrets. Secrets I couldn’t tell anyone.
“But you don’t?”
I shrugged, quiet for a moment before I answered, “We’re twins. I would know if he was dead.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Val thinks—”
“Rosie,” he cut me off. “I don’t want to know what Val thinks. I want to know what you think.” His lips grazed the shell of my ear. “Your thoughts are the only ones that matter to me.”
The tears came again. Pooling in my eyes, making it hard to see. But never filling enough to spill over. I couldn’t remember the last time someone told me my thoughts mattered. That my thoughts were important.
Val listened to all of us. We all had input on every woman and child we helped. Some ideas had merit and some didn’t. No one ever said someone’s idea was dumb, or that they didn’t know what they were talking about.
But no one ever said someone’s idea was important. Or that we couldn’t have done it without them. Val had a way of making us all feel valued and appreciated without having to stroke our egos with words.
But sometimes... I needed to hear the words.
“I don’t know. I want to believe that nothing but death would keep him from coming back for me. But I also don’t want to think about something happening to him.”
“I can talk to Nav. He can look for him. The things he can do, the people he can find, is nothing short of magic sometimes.”
“Sypher already tried. He has feelers out, algorithms. Whatever his tech shit is. But even he can’t find him.”
“Sypher,” he scoffed. “The kid isn’t all that.”
“Kid?” I asked, sitting up and turning to scowl at him. “You do know he’s older than me, right? Do you see me as a kid?”
“Rose—”
“Answer me, Cash. Do you see me as a kid?” I turned fully around and got on my knees between his legs. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the first time we met on this very mountain.
When he called me kid.
“Rosie, I’m thirty-four. Everyone under thirty is a kid to me.”
“So, you do see me as a kid.” I shook my head and got to my feet.
“Don’t you fucking leave!” he shouted as he got off the ground quicker than I would expect for a man his size.
“Don’t you yell at me! You never yelled at her! That’s what Grace said. Because she wasn’t a kid? You’re not my fucking father.”
“Kytten!”
I swung around. “Don’t fucking call me that. Not you!”
“Why? Why can’t I call you Kytten? Especially now when you have your fucking claws out.
” He grabbed my hands and pulled me close.
“Rachel was twenty years old when I met her. She was twenty-five when she died. Not much older than you. And I never yelled at her, because I fucking knew she would leave my ass.”
“You think I won’t?” I asked, glaring back at him.
“I won’t fucking let you,” he growled and then slammed his lips on mine.
Every thought, every angry word I wanted to spew at him, left me the moment his lips touched mine.