37. Anna
CHAPTER 37
Anna
H e asked me. He asked me to make the decision on Lane’s life. It was almost deafening how heavy the air got around us. The atmosphere thickened with unease as if challenging me. Power shifted and was resting in my hands, crackling with energy so electric I couldn’t breathe.
“Aren’t you going to fucking say anything?” Lane’s voice ricocheted through the air like a whirring bullet. “Tell him! Are you fucking deaf? Tell him!” He screamed at me, struggling between Reign’s powerful thighs that cemented him in place.
The glint of the knife caught my eye as the tip dripped with blood.
What’re you seven? Fat ass. Incompetent. Bitch.
His words rang through my mind, and I struggled to decide when all I desperately wanted was to be freed from the burden of choice.
“It’s up to you, my sweet girl.” Reign’s voice had never been softer than when he spoke to me. His blue eyes held me captive with the intensity of oceans unknown. The depths murky, the beauty fierce with danger. “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. I’m yours.”
“ A nd who do you obey?” His voice boomed in the empty church. Jesus stood behind him, huge and imposing, as they awaited my response.
“You.”
“What a good girl you are Anna.” His footsteps drew closer to me. I clenched my fists in my lap as I waited on my knees. “You will make such a beautiful bride for Daddy, won’t you?”
Nausea clawed at my insides like a rabid animal ready to bolt. I stiffly nodded, my head squeezing my eyes shut as thin fingers caressed my skin.
“Good girl,” he praised again. “I have taught you well.”
Nodding again, I allowed his cold fingers to guide me to my feet. Refusing to meet his stare, we left the church as silence permeated the air around us.
“Tell me you love me.” The rawness in his voice told me I better listen without defiance. It would be beaten out of me should I protest.
“I love you,” my tiny voice was barely heard over the thundering heartbeat that pounded just beneath the white dress I wore.
“I love you, what?”
The threat of tears choked my voice, a lump that refused to dissolve. A reminder of the fragility that lay just beneath the surface of the perfect little angel he’d raised and loved so sickeningly.
“I love you, Daddy. ”
“You’re learning.” I hadn’t seen his face. I couldn’t look at it after the whipping that so brutally broke me. He popped the trunk, and my neck snapped, taking him in. My eyes refused to look anywhere above his chin.
“But Daddy,” I said with tremors richocheting down to the bone marrow. “I was a good girl.”
My cheek stung with the unexpected slap. Back talking was never allowed, and I knew better than to question Daddy. I sucked my lower lip into my mouth to put pressure on the sting of the wound that wept profusely.
“You still disobeyed.” I could picture the tick in his jaw as he spoke the words. My peripherals showed him flicking his gaze around the empty parking lot, ensuring there were no prying eyes. “Now get in the trunk for Daddy,” he whispered eerily calm. “Or I’ll rip into you before you turn of age, and you’ll be defective for any Godly husband. God himself won’t even want you.”
The pain was subsiding, matching the throb that still pulsed in the back of my thighs from the whip. I nodded and carefully contorted my growing body to fit in the trunk. My hair was slammed in it last time, and he refused to stop leaving clumps of it tearing from my scalp. Like a warped path leading to my misery, a corrupted trail of breadcrumbs.
I had to be a good girl for Daddy. I knew what was right and what was wrong.
I knew right from wrong.
The unwelcome flashback dissipated, and my eyes adjusted to the grotesque scene unfolding, leaving me with the unanswered question from Reign. I wanted to be relieved from all choice, I thought that was my duty as a woman of God. To allow others to make those for me.
A sense of power saturated my veins, oxygenating my blood with renewed strength, reminding me that what I wanted mattered. Lane’s spiteful words no longer echoed in my head but new ones instead.
Kill him!
I heard it loud and clear in my mind. Chanting until I was saying it out loud as if in a manic trance, unable to control the words from tumbling off my lips.
“Kill him.”
My teeth clenched together as a wicked smile traced Reign’s dark features.
“As you wish, vixen.” His eyes on me were the warm waters of the Pacific, but once they turned to Lane, they became the iceberg that took out the Titanic.
Treacherous. Disastrous. Unyielding.
“You fucked up, fat fucking bitch, I’ll fucking…” Lane was cut off.
The blade caught the moonlight as Reign quickly whipped the weapon from left to right across Lane’s neck. Squelching sounds invaded my ears, leaving me deaf to everything else. Lane’s flesh seemed to separate effortlessly. Like a medium well steak that was tender through and through. The knife cut down to the sinewy muscles that spewed ruby-red liquid, leaving him unseeing.
Reign finally moved, landing in front of me. His movements nimble, his skilled fingers capable of more than wringing endless waves of pleasure from me. His bloody hand cupped my face and his lips came down on mine in a crash of metallic pleasure. Our tongues danced in the moonlit library as if we were the only two people who existed.
“I told you,” he breathed into my neck. Wet kisses were placed on the column of my throat. “He wouldn’t have to fret about his grade.”
The sentiment pulled a laugh from me. I almost didn’t recognize the sound; “Reign” was all I could manage. A universe of emotions flooded through me. Euphoria tickled my skin, sprinkled in with the fear of the murder I not only witnessed but encouraged.
“I’d never lie to you, sweet girl.” He held me in his arms as shock rippled through me, like a cold wind that swept away all of my composure. I was living in slow motion, waiting for my mind to catch up to the moment. “And I’d do anything for you.”
His words softened the part of my core I thought was long hardened.
“I’d unleash chaos and destruction upon this world, reducing it to ash. Sacrificing everything, leaving nothing but decay if it meant protecting you.”
My core throbbed. The needy ache crescendoing to a desperation only Reign could satisfy.
“Reign,” my voice was a plea laced with the sensuality that rolled through me, landing in my aching pussy. I clenched my thighs together. “Take me home and,” I bit my bottom lip as he gazed at me with all the love he could muster, “fuck me.”
His devilish grin promised me everything. It was a weapon that disarmed me completely. “As you wish, vixen.”