3. Ivy #2
He’s impassive, dark, cold, completely detached with a calm, dangerous exterior, as if he sees nothing wrong with what’s happening… This is the real Emmett.
And he’s about to kill me.
Tears well up in my eyes as I choke.
Horror, pain, and fear swell up in my chest, taking over as I realize my gamble was wrong… and I’m about to die for it.
“E-Emmett,” I choke.
My body starts weakening at a rate faster than a skydive.
I start to feel lightheaded, and my vision is no longer a blur. All I see now is a white film…
I can no longer breathe.
A strange euphoria like emptiness takes over me.
My limbs fall weakly at my sides.
Some memories and thoughts that I had at the back of my mind are no longer there.
This is it…
In that second, Emmett suddenly releases me, and I drop to the cold floor, coughing and spluttering, fighting to suck in air back into my oxygen-deprived lungs.
Tears run unchecked down my cheeks.
My body is trembling with fear, but Emmett just stands over me, watching me.
After several seconds, I look up at him, hate and agony raving in my chest as I caress my sore neck.
Emmett crouches down, reaches for my chin with two long, calloused fingers, then lifts my chin, tilting up my head until our gazes are firmly locked on to each other.
I’m crying, while he calmly and impassively stares at me.
“Is this how you think I’ll let you go?” he asks in a rough voice. “How can I let you die so easily without having you fully experience the consequences of your decision?”
It’s the complete unbothered expression on his face that does me in.
To my horror, tears start falling down my face, fast, hot, and so annoying, I hate them and myself for falling apart in front of this jerk.
A rage unlike anything I’ve ever felt before springs up in me, and I explode.
Without thinking, I launch myself at him.
The impact is so sudden that he has no time to brace. I knock him down to the floor.
Not giving him time to react, I quickly straddle him, and I start pummeling his chest with my balled fists, as pain and anger take over me.
“I hate you!” I scream, pounding his chest. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!!”
My voice is hoarse and unpleasant to my own ears, but I don’t stop.
“I hate you!” I shout. “You did this to me! How could you?”
I’m crying, in agony and so afraid of the whole world right now, but most of all, I’m realizing that the person who I loved, the person who treated me so well, the person who I have fantasied over, built an entire life with (in my head), it turns out he really doesn’t want me.
“You made me fall for you!” I cry hoarsely but it’s painful. “You made me entwine my heart with your sick, twisted heartbeat, you cold-blooded, cruel asshole! You let me suffer and now you are selling me? I hate you!”
I grew up people pleasing, overcompensating for my faults, neglecting myself, being pathetic with no self-confidence or the ability to see things clearly. Yes, it’s not his fault. It’s mine… for believing he’d catch me when I fell.
He just never did.
“Am I that disposable to you?” I shout, crying, raging, breaking apart. “You selfish bastard! I fucking hate you! I wish I had never met you! I hate you!”
He doesn’t love me.
He doesn’t care for me.
He wants to get rid of me.
Fantasies born from unrequited love are not just lethal poison, they’re downright evil.
It starts out cute and innocent enough until the fantasy becomes desperate, horrifying, and resentful.
It’s a shame that I only realize the potent danger of my love for this man in this moment, as I fall all the way apart, heartbroken with my soul shattered.
Why did I never listen to him?
Why did I hope and pray and stay as close to him as I could?
Why did I give him my heart?
Why did I ever love him?
So, I rage, no longer sane.
The disappointment of meeting my parents, coupled with what almost happened to me last night and now this, all hits me at once.
I’m breaking apart and no longer able to contain the thousands of emotions I’ve been subject to these past ten days and the years I have loved this man.
“I hate you!” I cry. “And I hate myself even more for loving you!”
There’s a shrill, loud cry and screaming echoing around me, but I don’t even notice that it’s coming from me.
I’m just erupting, going batshit crazy on this man.
Somewhere in the haze of me punching his chest, I notice that he doesn’t fight back or do anything at all.
He just stares back at me with an indecipherable look in his eyes.
And that enrages me even further, so I punch harder, wanting him to feel it.
“Stop,” he suddenly says, his gaze filled with something disturbing. That one word is spoken like a command but, in my anger, I ignore it.
I know I should tread lightly here and be calm, but I’m beyond rational thought.
I’m overwhelmed, livid, and there’s chaos inside me that’s clawing at my chest, slicing me apart.
The pain.
The guilt.
The fear…
All of it has come to a boil that’s so beyond me, and this man, is the source of my ire.
The one who caused my heartbreak.
Yes, he doesn’t love me… but does he hate me enough to throw me away?
“Angel,” he warns again, but I don’t stop.
In a move so fast I don’t even catch it, Emmett sits up with me in his arms.
He shifts into a position where he’s half kneeling, with a raised knee, and then he quickly flips me over it.
Shifting me until I’m lying over his thigh and at his mercy in this precarious position, he holds me down, demonstrating his strength and the futileness of my struggle.
But he doesn’t stop there.
Emmett subdues me with his steely arm, then I feel him lean down to my ear.
“Are you done?” he questions in a voice so sinister and dark, I shudder.
“I hate you!”
“Do you?” he says softly.
Not bothering to wait for my answer, I feel him pull up his shirt that I’m wearing and I feel a breeze on my backside.
Did he just…?
I suddenly feel his touch going lower and lower until his large palm is firmly planted on my ass covered by the boxer briefs he dressed me in.
The shudder that goes through me this time is enough to cause an earthquake.
My breath catches in my throat. My heart jumps and kicks against my chest.
A foreboding sensation tingles somewhere in the back of my mind, but I can’t move.
“Then let me give you an outlet,” he says sinisterly.
With those words, he rips apart the briefs, leaving me bare and exposed right there, in the middle of his large, dark office.
Without warning, I hear the unmistakable sound of the air being sliced before I hear a loud slap… and immediately the painful sensation follows.
I scream.
But Emmett doesn’t care.
He strikes my behind hard, fast without restraint fifteen more times in quick succession, spanking me until my brain scatters.
My skin is burning and itching at the same time… but Emmett doesn’t stop.
“You hate me?” he asks harshly. “You don’t fear death?”
With each strike, I gasp loudly, flinching, trying to get away, but also hold on to him, I’m a mess.
“Your mutiny against death is my fault,” he states in a low, hoarse voice. “I taught you not to fear it, but that doesn’t mean you go around acting like no one can hurt you in the most brutal ways possible.”
The sound of my ass being slapped is so loud and harsh to my ears, but what shocks me even more is that instead of crying, a strange haze descends over me.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
Each one is harder than the last, more painful and jarring… but for some absurd reason, the more intense the pain, the more I’m horrified at the way I start feeling hot inside me.
“You hate me?” he seethes. “You don’t want my noose of a nickname? What the fuck do you think this is?”
Each strike is like fire licking my buttocks.
“Do you think you have an option when it comes to this? To us?” he demands, his voice like velvet, but his touch, like molten fire, striking relentlessly.
“How dare you think you can end us with those toxic words? Do you think you can ever get back anything you’ve given me? It’s impossible and I will never allow it!” he promises cruelly. “The years you spent lusting for me, wanting me, loving me… it all belongs to me, not you! Don’t get it twisted!”
I can hear my cries, but I can also hear something that sounds like a moan…
The pain is too much, but it’s as if I want more of it.
I don’t tell him to stop.
I don’t even cry for him to let me go, instead I just lie there, taking it because in the spanking, my brain has escaped.
The world has turned upside down.
My breath no longer matters.
Nothing matters at all.
Samuel’s disappearance.
The danger to Grammy.
My mother’s manipulations and lies.
Melissa setting me up.
Being almost raped.
My heartbreak over this man…
Every overwhelming emotion, thought, secret, reality… it fades into nothing as Emmett strikes my ass harder, faster, pushing me past everything and mentally tossing me into an airborne state of being.
My body softens, turning into liquid over Emmett’s thigh.
I feel nothing… everything rushing past me like a fading horror film behind my eyelids.
I don’t know how long it goes on for, but when I come to, Emmett is holding me in his arms as I fall apart, sobbing.
And I’m clinging to him tightly like a koala bear, not daring to let go of this cruel monster. If I could crawl into his skin, I would.
He holds me to him just as tight, soothing me, stroking my hair back from my face, muttering things I can’t understand, but it’s as if I’m someone completely different from before.
My head is silent. Gone is all the noise and mayhem from before.
“Shh, I’ve got you, baby,” Emmett is whispering softly in my ear. “You can let it all go.”
I don’t know when he moved me, but the way he’s holding me now, my body straddling him as he sits on the floor, leaning against the wall, cradling me like a baby, fucks my head up so bad that I don’t know what to think.
“I’m so sorry for dropping the ball last night, baby,” he says gruffly against my ear. “No one will ever harm you ever again.”
I can hear the steely resolve in his promise and my heart breaks even more.
Without me even voicing it, he accurately pinpointed my pain is also from what almost happened to me last night.
It was horrific, yes, but why is he ignoring the more prominent agony in me?
My backside is on fire but in this position, I can feel Emmett’s hardness against my stomach.
Slowly, hesitantly, I pull back to look at him with my tear-glazed eyes.
His high cheekbones are tinged with color, but in his dark-forest green orbs, there’s concern, curiosity, and something completely disquieting that makes my breath catch.
I don’t know what he’s thinking, but it’s as if he’s waiting for something as he looks at me.
He’s stroking my still painful and exposed ass slowly, letting me study him.
He doesn’t move or say anything when I reach for his face with trembling fingers.
Gently, tentatively, I run my fingers over his well-maintained eyebrows, then his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, and then his lips.
I stare into his eyes, the euphoria making me a fool, and a very brave one at that.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice sounding like gentle waves crushing softly on the beach.
It breaks me.
“Do you really hate me this much?” I whisper brokenly. “You really don’t feel anything for me, huh?”
“Angel…” he says gruffly, hugging me tighter, pulling me closer. It’s addictive and treacherous.
“You want me to marry him?”
“I want you to tell them that you’re marrying him.”
“Because I’m nothing to you,” I whisper.
Brokenly, I twine my arms around the neck of my torturer, sinking my fingers into his hair and cling to him, desperate for something my body instinctively knows only he can give.
Without thinking, I lean in even closer until our foreheads are pressed together.
“Our unbreakable contract,” I whisper past my dry throat. “I know what I want.”
Emmett is silent for a while before he speaks in a husky tone that pours over my skin like honey.
“What do you want?”
I hold his gaze, our foreheads still pressed together.
When I don’t say anything, he says, “Anything you want, I’ll give it to you.
If you want revenge on them, you don’t even need to say it.
It’s going to happen. Do you want someone’s head delivered to you on a silver platter?
Do you want answers? I’ll get them for you.
If it’s my head you want, please be patient. I’ll have it delivered to you soon.”
He says that last part so solemnly, unaffected, and cold that I freeze.
“Anything you want, or need, or desire, I’ll fulfill it for you.”
I’m not shocked by his words. Emmett has always been absolute when it comes to everything he does.
He never gives his word lightly and he has never dishonored a commitment.
Because to him, everything is nothing. The world is like dust to the unattached.
Nothing matters.
Emotions are a hindrance, which is why he was unbothered when he told me what he wants.
From his solemn words, I don’t miss how he’s offering me everything, from people’s heads to bloody revenge… but that’s not what I want.
I pull back slightly so I can look at him clearly.
“You can’t say no,” I warn him seriously.
His brow furrows before he nods in tacit agreement, his gaze dark and oh-so deep, I shiver.
“Emmett,” I warn, bothered by his silence.
“Angel, I’m unable to deny you… anything.”
Another powerful shudder goes through me that I’m sure he feels because his hold around me tightens reflexively.
“Tell me, baby,” he says huskily, his lips brushing featherlight against mine. “Tell me what you want.”
The delicious friction moves through my body and just like that, all hell breaks loose.
Or maybe I’ve truly lost my mind.
Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment, but I when I look him dead in the eye, I tell him.
“I want you to give me a baby.”