Chapter 16 #2
She makes it sound like we’re vampires and we sucked him dry and then filled him up with fresh preternatural spunk instead of blood.
“He says it’s all a lie, but it wasn’t a lie. It was real. He loved me. I knew. We had our secrets. I saw all his signs.”
She also makes it sound like they were lovers, which even in my addle-brained state, is definitely uh, twisted.
I mean, he’s her dad, right. I know that doesn’t necessarily spell sanity, but still…
At least there was no biological connection between me and my bastard stepdad.
Hell, he wasn’t even officially that. Just some shithead who wheedled his way into my mother’s flat and never left.
Maybe I’m just reading more into her expression than is actually there. Maybe they were just super close. But if that’s true, how could she not know he was into guys? I knew it before we’d ever shaken hands.
“I didn’t turn him, Mallory.” I’m not responsible for his or anyone else’s sexual preferences or conduct.
“Your father, Whit, he instigated it. It’s what he wanted.
I only agreed to join in because—” Damned if I can actually remember why I agreed to fuck him.
I was drunk and, “—he begged me.” He’d been angling for it throughout the shoot, and then after he’d finally jammed his dick into Adam, he went all out whining to be the filling in a salami sandwich.
Thankfully, I’ve wits enough not to tell her that.
“That’s not true. You’re making it up. He’s not like that. He wouldn’t do that.”
I hate to break it to her, but… “He might not have been out but neither of us were his first.”
“Liar!”
Okay, so maybe the truth isn’t the way to go. “Look, I’m sorry. I get that it’s difficult to hear things about your dad, to learn he’s not the person you thought he was, but…”
Her hand closes around my throat and the knifepoint tickles the skin to the right of my eye.
I’m a goddamned idiot for forgetting she had hold of it.
She draws the blade down along the ridge of my cheek bone, leaving behind a line of fire.
Wetness that has nothing to do with the tears leaking from my eyes runs down my cheek.
Shit! I daren’t move. Daren’t even blink or swallow.
If I do, that blade’s going to end up in my eye, and then I’m likely enough dead, never mind disfigured.
The pounding in my ears increases. It takes a second for me to realise it’s my heart hammering away. The knots in my guts make my belly clench so hard, it’s a miracle I don’t heave.
“Okay, I’m sorry. Please. Don’t do this. I’ll do whatever you want…give you what you want.”
“It’s too late for that, you fucking shit. Do you know how long I waited for him? Do you?”
I don’t, but I daren’t shake my head. “I’m sorry. Don’t.”
“Fourteen years. Fourteen bloody years of being shuttled about, treated like lost property, but then he came, and he chose me. I was everything he wanted. He said that, and I know it was true. And he and Lydia took me home. He gave me his name, when she never even got that.”
I always assumed Lydia kept her maiden name for practical reasons.
“He loved me. Loved me more than he ever loved her.”
“I’m sure he still does love you.”
So, she’s adopted. Things start making marginally more sense. It’s likely that she’s suffered through a ton of shit. Then again, plenty of kids wind up in foster care and plenty of others pray for that possibility, most of them don’t go fruit loop and pull knives on people.
“I’m sure he still cares about you deeply, and once things settle down between your folks he’ll let you know that.”
“No,” she screams, blasting minty fresh breath into my face and already watering eyes.
“He doesn’t want me now. I was saving myself for him.
I knew Lydia couldn’t give him what he needed, but I could, and I was going to, but then you wrecked it with your perfect body, and your smiley, bright white teeth, and your hair, and your eyes, and suits, and all your rainbow-coloured shit.
You and Bask, you did things to him. Brainwashed him.
He’s not right now. He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t want what I’ve got, even though I know I could make him so happy. He’s stopped giving me the signs.”
She’s nuts. She’s absolutely goddamn cracked.
“I didn’t make him queer, Mallory.” I didn’t make Whit anything. He knew exactly what he wanted, what he liked, and he went all out to get it.”
“You turned him,” she screams into my face.
I cling onto my breath, desperate to hold it inside and not let it out and risk provoking her further, but we’re already past that.
“I’m going to cut you. I’m going to make sure you can’t do it to anyone else. They won’t want you if you’re not pretty.”
I focus hard on the sensation of the mattress beneath me, of the overt freshness of her breath, anything but the slicing agony that’s causing both ear and toothache.
Another cut sears pain through my jaw.
“When I’m done you won’t be able to fuck anyone ever again, and even if you could, no one will want to look at you.”
It’s my chest she scores a line across this time, but I don’t think about that, or where her attention is heading.
Instead, I lick at my dry lips and repeat myself. “I didn’t make him gay.”
There’s blood beading in the wounds she’s opened.
“Duh!” she taps her head with the heel of her hand, which at least gets the knife away from my body for a second.
“Do you think I’m an idiot? I know exactly what you did, I heard him describing it all to Lydia, every sordid little detail.
It was disgusting. You’re sick. I can’t believe all the twisted things you made him want to do. ”
For some reason, her words make me think of Adam and his insistence that I had a screwed up mind.
I still can’t slot all the pieces of this particular puzzle together, but a definite pattern is starting to emerge.
One in which Adam is as much the victim as I am, but right now my priority isn’t so much making sense of this nonsense as getting out of here, before she moves from taunting me with that piece of razor sharp steel and actually starts filleting me.
So far all she’s inflicted are scratches. They sting, but none of them are deep.
“Did you read my letters, Dylan? You know what’s coming, right? I’m going to take it from you. Then you won’t be able to fuck anyone anymore.”
She raises her head, and I make a split second decision.
My forehead smashes into her nose, and there’s a sickening crunch, followed by a gush of steaming liquid and a too loud howl of rage.
I jerk sideways, tipping her over onto her back, then struggle onto my knees, hands still tied to the headboard.
She’s used cable ties, and the damn things won’t come off.
“Not so fast.” She’s up like a jackrabbit, and on my back, her blood spilling into the neckline of my open shirt. This time the knife is at my throat.
There’s a creak to the side of us, then Mallory’s whole body tenses.
“Let him go.”
Kira? She came back. She’s here. I don’t know how she got in here—presumably through the door and not a window—but my heart thunders with joy. And not just because I’m in dire need of rescuing.
“Put the knife down, Mallory.”
“No,” my attacker snarls, every bit the petulant teen. “You don’t tell me what to do. No one does.”
“Put it down and let Dylan go, and no one needs to get hurt.” I think Kira must have prodded Mallory in the back, because her body jerks against mine.
“You’re not going to shoot. If you pull the trigger, the bullet will go through me into him.”
“Is that so? Did you consider that’s maybe an outcome I’m willing to risk? Now put the knife down.”
Kira has a gun? That’s news to me. Close protection officers don’t carry arms while in the UK. The law prohibits it.
I’m stunned when Mallory actually drops the knife.
The red stained blade lands on the pillow, and I watch the blood from it seep into the pillowcase. Meanwhile, Kira hauls Mallory off my back and onto her knees on the floor.
“Hands where I can damn well see them,” Kira barks.
I hear the click of something. Cuffs snapping around Mallory’s wrists, I pray.
“Nose to the carpet.”
I turn my head when I hear the thud. Mallory’s sprawled face down on the carpet with her hand’s fastened behind her.
“Dylan, you okay?” Kira asks.
I nod, my lungs burning and my throat too tight for me to form words. I’m so goddamned glad to see her. No one ever looked so good or brought such light into my world before.
“Dylan, are you all right?”
“Fine,” I croak, and fight against the restraints still holding me to the headboard. I hate being pinned. “Get these fucking things off me.” There’s blood running into my mouth.
“Just take it easy. I’ll be right there.
I’m going to release you.” She edges around Mallory, giving her a wide berth.
The mattress tilts as she puts her weight on the edge and leans over to help me.
There’s no gun, just an empty Perrier bottle in her hand, which she drops in order to pick up the knife.
“Just hold still. The more you pull the tighter these damn things will get.”
Yeah, I’m not enjoying the way they’re biting into my skin, and the knife is far from the perfect tool.
It also takes Kira’s attention away from where I’d prefer it to be.
My body’s still wired for danger and anticipating further assault, but Kira’s no fool, and the only movement Mallory makes is some beached fish like flapping.
The cable ties snap, and tingles thread through my palms and into my fingertips as the capillaries fill with blood. “You came back,” I say, reaching out and clasping her shoulders. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I should never have left you. I failed you.”
“You didn’t.”
She touches my face near to where Mallory has cut me. The ghosts in her eyes say otherwise, that she’ll never forgive herself for leaving me exposed. That isn’t how I see it. There was no reason for her to be here with me anymore. As far as anyone knew the game was up. My stalker in custody.
Kira shakes her head solemnly. “She should never have got this close.”
“You thought the threat had been removed.”
“I still shouldn’t have left you.”
I curl my hand over the top of her fingers, where she’s still holding me. “You’re here now, that’s what matters. How did you know?” Did she know?
“I was on my way back anyway, and then Howard called. Bask’s story actually checked out. The team were able to trace the number the messages he’d supposedly received from you came from. Turns out it was registered to Hugo Whit.”
Mallory’s adoptive dad. I’m not sure that entirely explains how they made the leap from Hugo to Mallory, but there’s no opportunity to ask, as the police bust in and surround the three of us.
Howard Falchard sent the cavalry.