Chapter 25
Bastian
Haven rounds on me the moment Kai is out of sight.
“What is wrong with you?”
My face throbs where she clawed me earlier. My nose may be broken. And somewhere beneath the physical discomfort, an ephemeral ache that feels suspiciously like guilt is burrowing its way deep inside me.
“Christ, girl, you’re the one who—“
Haven’s palm connects with my shredded cheek. Blinding, exquisite pain causes me to stumble back a step, my hand flying to my face as fresh blood wells from the scratches.
For a moment, I just stare at her.
No one has struck me like that since…since Evelyn.
“Don’t you dare blame me for your cruelty.” Haven’s voice is shaking with righteous fury. “Are you too blind to realize that’s all you’re fucking capable of?”
“I wasn’t being cruel. I was being honest.”
She shoves at my chest, and I let her. Let her push me back another step, then another. “Something life-changing happened to him last Friday, and your first thought was to mock him about it?”
I catch her wrists before she can shove me again.
“Let go of me!”
I release her, and she stumbles back, chest heaving, eyes wild. My blood is caked under her fingernails and her torn stockings are filthy with dirt and worse.
“You couldn’t resist twisting the knife, could you?” She jabs a finger at the door Kai just fled through. “You couldn’t just tell him what happened and let him process it. You had to punish him for it.”
“I didn’t—“
“Tell him he ‘cried like a pathetic little simp?’” She throws my words back at me laced with acid.
The accusation lands harder than her slap did.
“You know she’s right,” Good Wolf murmurs. “You saw him break.”
I did.
The way his skin went grey. The way his hands began trembling. The way he looked at me like I’d just confirmed his worst fear about himself—not that he wanted me, but that wanting me made him something shameful.
Something wrong.
“He broke because he’s weak,” Bad Wolf growls.
“You were weak once, too,” Good Wolf counters. “They were all weak, once. That’s why they all turned out the way they did.”
I turn away from Haven, my jaw clenching so hard my teeth ache.
I think of the names I’ve collected over the years the way other men collect baseball cards. Rivals I had no choice but to befriend. Each of them had a before, like me. A moment that cracked them open and let something darker flood in.
I’ve had several, all buried deep and without sentiment.
One of them claws its way to the surface, anyway.
I’d just turned seventeen, but my height made it easy to get into bars. Like the one in Boston that was just far enough from campus that no one would recognize me.
He was older—late thirties, thinning hair, but such a charismatic smile. Something about him made my stomach flip in ways I struggled to process.
I was drunk. And…curious. Back then I was still trying to understand why my body responded to certain people the way it did, and why the sick fantasies that kept me up at night weren’t always about women.
He bought me a drink. Touched my arm when he laughed. Held eye contact until my cock twitched.
And while he took the lead, he always waited for my consent.
Respectful. Cautious.
Until he wasn’t.
I shouldn’t have followed him back to his car. But I let his gentle, almost patronizing air lull me into a false sense of security. That, and the alcohol, made me feel safe.
As soon as I was in the backseat of his SUV, he was shoving my face into the seat. He wasn’t taller, but he was much heavier, and used his weight to pin me down.
I knew I’d made a mistake when he put his mouth by my ear and started telling me how much he hated gays. The slurs he unleashed on me were almost as bad as the feel of his cock slapping against my ass cheeks. The cold air on my exposed skin when he wrenched down my jeans.
He might have been bigger than me, but I was much, much more psychopathic.
I let him rape me, forcing myself not to struggle, fighting through my own pain, gathering my strength, waiting until he was distracted by his orgasm. Then I tore free and turned on him like a rabid animal.
I broke his orbital socket first.
Then his nose, then his jaw.
He was still breathing when I wrapped my hands around his throat. Still trying to speak, to plead, blood bubbling between his lips.
He stopped breathing three minutes later.
I held on for several minutes more, just in case.
I watched the light leave his eyes, and I felt no guilt. No horror. Just the satisfaction that this man who tried to take something from me would never take anything from anyone again.
He was the second life I took.
The first doesn’t bear thinking about. Not tonight.
In the hours and days that followed his death, as I scrubbed his blood from under my fingernails and read about his body being discovered in the papers, I realized I wasn’t disgusted by what I’d done.
I was disgusted by what I’d wanted.
By the part of me that had followed him willingly. That had wanted to be touched, to be desired, to be claimed by him.
By a man.
It took years to untangle the shame from the survival. To understand that my attraction to men wasn’t the sickness—he was.
Years.
I just shoved that truth down Kai’s throat…and then mocked him for choking on it.
“Bastian.”
I realize I’ve been staring at the wall, my hand still pressed to my wounded cheek.
“What?” I grate.
“I’m going to fetch Kai.” She’s already moving toward the door. “And you’re going to apologize to him for being such a fucking asshole.”
I scoff. “I’m not going to—“
“You are.” She pauses at the door, her hand on the handle, glaring at me with eyes like a goddamn blowtorch. “He deserves an apology.”
I want to remind her I’m not the kind of man who apologizes. That contrition is a weakness, and pity a sin.
Instead, I hear myself say, “And if he doesn’t want to come back?”
Her eyes harden even more. “Then I guess you’ll be questioning your life choices.” Cold air rushes in when she pulls open the door. “Alone.”
The door swings shut behind her, and I’m left standing in the mausoleum surrounded by the wreckage of the evening—blood on the granite, the shattered lamp’s oil pooling onto the floor, the lingering scent of sex and violence.
“Your friends will never abandon you,” Bad Wolf says.
“They don’t count,” Good Wolf whines mournfully. “They’re evil, all of them.”
I lean over the sarcophagus, my head dropping into my hands.
The wounds on my face throb in time with my heartbeat. I can feel the blood crusting in the gouges, pulling at my skin every time I move. Haven marked me tonight—marked me in a way that might scar.
As if I need the reminder of what a monster I am.
I’ve spent so long believing I was the one holding all the cards. The puppet master, the architect, the one who decides how the game is played. The one who ended it when things didn’t go my way.
But Haven just showed me how easily those cards can scatter.
And Kai…he showed me something worse.
He showed me myself. Young and terrified, trying to outrun a truth that caught him anyway.
I was cruel because his fear disgusted me.
Because my fear disgusts me.
The door swings open, and Haven steps through first, her slight frame silhouetted against the moonlight. She’s got her arm around someone—supporting them, guiding them.
Kai.
He’s pale, sweating despite the cold, his eyes red-rimmed as he refuses to meet mine. He’s trembling so badly I can see it from here.
But he came back.
They both did.
My chest is so tight, it feels like I’m leagues under water.
“Don’t fuck this up,” both my wolves growl in unison.
For once, I intend to listen to both of them.
Haven guides Kai closer. His shoulders slump, and he’s making a point of not looking at me.
I don’t blame him.
Haven stands beside Kai with her hand on his back, rubbing small circles between his shoulder blades. The gesture is instinctive, like she doesn’t even have to think about it.
“Well?” Haven’s eyes narrow.
Right.
The apology.
I clear my throat. “I’m sorry. I…fucked up.”
Haven’s expression hardens. “That’s it?” she asks dryly. “You with your big brain, and your fucking psychology degree, and that’s the best you could come up with?”
I let out a half-groan, half-growl. “What do you want from me?”
She crosses her arms. “You left out the part about you being a fucking cunt, and how you’re never going to speak to him like that again.”
I grit my teeth.
Apologies feel like handing someone a weapon and asking them to stab me with it. Every instinct I have screams against this kind of vulnerability. This weakness.
But Kai is standing three feet away from me, so familiarly broken. And I’m the one who broke him.
I move closer—at eye level with him if he’d only lift his goddamn head.
“Look at me, boy.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Kai, please. Just look at me.”
A long moment passes. Then, slowly, he raises his head. His green eyes are bloodshot, red-rimmed, and so fucking empty.
“What I did tonight was…unforgivable.” The words struggle to leave my tight throat. “Not telling you the truth—you deserved to know that. But the way I told you…”
I pause, forcing myself to hold his gaze even though every fiber of my being screams at me to look away.
“I know what it’s like to feel as if your own body has betrayed you. To wonder if wanting something makes you…” I force a swallow. “Weak. Or broken.”
Kai’s jaw tightens, his eyelids quivering, but he doesn’t look away.
“And I know it takes time to figure that stuff out for yourself.” My voice drops. “But it’s so much easier for me to be cruel than to be kind.”
The mausoleum is so quiet I can hear the wind whistling outside.
“I’m sorry, Kai.” The words feel foreign to my tongue. Clumsy. But I mean them. “You don’t deserve what I did to you tonight. No one does.”
Kai stares at me for a long moment.
Then he drops his head back down, a shuddering breath escaping his lungs.
He doesn’t acknowledge the apology. Just stands there, processing. Or maybe he’s just surviving—like we all are.