Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Wyatt’s eyes are glassy. The more I push him, the more spaced-out he looks. But his pupils are huge, so I keep going. He keeps pushing, snarking back, and flashing his teeth at me.
“What are you going to do about it?” Wyatt growls, sassing me. Mocking my power.
My blood hums. The power that I feel right now is the most I’ve felt on this island. Wyatt is testing that. Seeing how much I’ll take.
Glancing around the room, I notice the decorative bamboo. It takes seconds to stalk over, snatch one, and come back. Wyatt watches me with an expression that looks like unbridled lust. Then, he stifles it back down.
The bamboo is about three feet long, light, but sturdy. I trace the bamboo down his arm to his fingers. “What do you want me to do about it?”
Wyatt doesn’t answer, but I see the goosebumps rise on his skin.
“Do you want me to punish you with it?” I consider how hard I can hit him with it before it breaks and test its bend between my hands. It feels firm, which makes me worry it’ll break. “Punish you until you call a fucking plane and get us off this stupid fucking island.”
Wyatt doesn’t answer, so I snap the bamboo down onto his left thigh. It bounces off the muscle there with a snap, and I can feel the rebound in my hand.
Wyatt groans, and it’s like music to my ears. He’s going to let us go, or I’ll make him.
We go a few rounds, and Wyatt gets quieter and quieter. When I hit him again, and he doesn’t even move his head, that buzz quiets enough to let Oakley’s voice through. “Holli?”
I look at him, but he’s looking at Wyatt.
I pause, looking at the bound man in front of me.
The feeling of revenge is humming deep in my bones.
This feels right. This feels like a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
But when I look at Wyatt again, I notice he’s shrunken into himself.
He’s no longer pulling on the zipties, and he somehow looks… smaller.
“Wyatt?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
Immediately, irrational anger hits me. How dare he ruin this for me? How dare he take away the one thing that was going right?
But those feelings are followed quickly by fear. Did he switch, and I didn’t notice?
“When you’re bad, you get punished.” Wyatt’s tone is soft, like it comes from deep inside the huge frame of the person in front of me. There’s no swagger or menace to it.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Then, from somewhere in the house, an alarm starts going off. Oakley and I freeze at the blaring sound that’s coming from down the hall.
Wyatt’s head snaps up, and there’s a scared look on his face that doesn’t belong to him.
Oh god. I watch control slip from my fingers like trying to hold water—gone just as quickly as it was there.