Chapter 24
twenty-four
He’s following close behind as I jump into my Mercedes E-Class. Fortunately, it’s black. Rain scatters like glitter across the windshield. Thunder growls behind us like a warning. Vanq hesitates on the curb. That split second of uncertainty only fuels the fire in my chest.
“Get in the car!” I yell, cracking the window just enough for my voice to slice through.
He slides into the passenger seat just as I slam on the gas.
“Where the fuck are we going?”
“The marina,” I bite out. “It’s where he takes his ‘special girls.’”
Silence thickens between us. My hands grip the wheel like I want to snap it in half.
“It was on his boat?”
That question breaks something loose in my chest. Breath on my neck. Pain as he plunged inside repeatedly. Slapping at his face and begging, crying, please, no. His hand over my mouth. The rhythmic horror of his weight slamming into me.
“The first time,” I say through gritted teeth.
Despite all his black clothes, I sense Vanq tense up underneath and growl, “First time…”
I never wrote about the others. Not in my journal or anywhere. If I didn’t put them into words, maybe they didn’t count. I could pretend it only happened once.
I could survive one time.
It was a mistake I even made it there as a sixteen-year-old girl. A politician party with everyone I’d want to impress for my future. Dad was away and Mom was at home with everyone else.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me the details. I want to hear them.” Vanq has gone completely still. I thought he’d already read what happened in my diary. But my brain won’t shake loose the memories despite the night drive flashing through the windshield.
As I drive faster toward our goal, I mutter the words aloud. Mainly to myself, like Vanq can hear the soliloquy in my head.
“Ryan was my escort for the evening. It would kill him to know what happened while he was distracted. They must have persuaded him to stay upstairs. He was only eighteen. Didn’t know.”
Wasn’t his fault.
It was mine?
“I knew something was off, but went downstairs to the bedroom with Reggie anyway after he asked me to help him with something. I’d been given champagne. Perhaps too much. Then…” I swallow.
Muttering the phrases like they’re ingrained in nerve endings somewhere deep in my brain, I speak. “Perfect servant of Caliphylla… She’s obedient. Silent. If I wanted to get ahead… Future President of Northview. It sounded terrifying then. Not at all like I had dreamed of.”
Then he convinced me to keep quiet, or else he would kill my family. And he could, too. With the society’s blessing. Laid out all the ways in which they wanted Xavier Cardell to die. In every gruesome detail.
“Every day that summer before my junior year of high school was hell with him. The only way I could escape in my mind was through that embalmed Monarch. Purposefully rubbing it was the only control I had. Keeping myself focused on the feel of it so I didn’t have to pay attention to what was going on in the rest of my body without my permission. ”
Reggie ripped confidence from me. And that’s when I changed. Became compliant. Not at all the woman my father always said I would become.
Missing the opportunity to take Reggie out when I had the chance is infuriating. I’m not letting him go again. Not to hurt anyone else.
I finally have the strength to do what I should have all those years ago…
But now I’m snatching it all back.
Whipping the steering wheel hard on a turn, I jerk my head toward Vanq’s mask and spit out, “Did you set me up to feel this way? Livid, but unable to do anything about it? Because you’ve been pissing me the fuck off.”
“Good.”
My jaw drops. “Really?”
“That’s exactly how I need you. Angry enough to break free. You think escaping your cocoon is painless? That it won’t cost you tears, agony, rage? Let it. Focus that pain, Monarch. Aim your fury at him, and I’ll be right beside you, every step of the way.”
Seething ire quells into staunch determination. The reality of what I’m about to do sinks in. I’d already fought the “can I” and even “should I.”
Now, I know it’s a must.
I have to kill Reggie before he continues his tirade against other girls.
The parking lot is nearly empty at this time of night, but unfortunately, it’s well lit.
Vanq turns my shoulders toward him after I shut off the engine and then tugs down my mask further. “There.”
A pulse pounds deep in my belly from nerves or anger. I’m not sure which. Naomi would’ve given me a shove. Told me to stop being a whiny bitch and cut the fucker open already.
I can do this.
“Let’s go.”
Our shield is nightfall, the rain picking up softly around us. Vanq hovers just behind me like a bodyguard, moving like silk in his steps. Maybe it’s the adventure or nature, but I get a whiff around me and think of Elliot, a tear forming in my eye.
No time for sentiments. But the resentment I feel toward my masked stalker is growing.
It feels like I haven’t made a true choice. Not in my love life. But it doesn’t matter. I’m to be appointed to whomever the board decides. Vanq’s cock won’t make any difference then.
And neither will Elliot’s.
“Here?” Vanq asks as we board the yacht and head up on deck.
“I’ll wait behind this wall.” I duck down into the cockpit. When he climbs aboard, I’ll jump him.
“Below deck would be best.”
“You go, then. I’m staying right here,” I snap with ferocity.
Into the dark shadows, he disappears just as a car door slams from the parking lot. A high-pitched squeal and shuffling steps approach.
“I-I-I’m not feeling very well,” a woman’s voice says. “I think I”—hiccup—“need to go…”
“Nah, I need company tonight, sweetheart. My friend took off too early. And I’m not tired.”
If I thought my heart couldn’t pound any harder, I was wrong. With every approaching step, I want to scream into the void to get rid of the anxiety building within me. Sliding a hand into my pocket, I pull out the blade and flick it open as they alight the steps.
Fear overtakes me then. And instead of springing out, I shrink back for a moment…
Until he shoves the woman toward the sofas as she stumbles, clearly drunk. His big body falls on top of hers, and she struggles to fight him off.
I thought I would leap out. Maybe use force.
But I saunter forward, Reggie completely unaware.
I push out the thought that it should be Naomi that’s alive and not me. That if I fail this, it won’t matter because perhaps I was the one who should’ve died. If I’d gone ahead with my group, perhaps I could’ve saved them.
“But you can save yourself,” she’d say. “You can save the next girl.”
My eyes well up until the scene before me is a watercolor of events. Woman screaming, thrashing, hitting him as he attempts to force his way in.
Each step I take is quiet, lethal, calculated.
I embody the woman I was always meant to be.
With every roll of my heels to toes in my boots, I remember: the acrid smell of his coffee breath. His Rolex ticking next to my ear as he pounded into me from behind. Sweat dripping from his forehead onto my neck, slithering into my cleavage. Gritty sounds of his grunts as he came…
The memories wash away as I close the distance, clouds clearing before my vision until he’s in front of me, bent over the poor woman who’s crying now. Saying no. Like that matters to the monster.
With the utmost care, I sink the knife into the back of his skull. There’s no resistance. It slides in like butter as his body freezes, then seizes. He chokes on a breath, grasping his throat, unable to figure out what happened.
I lift a finger to my mouth as the woman beneath him opens hers to release a scream.
“You’re free now. It’s all over,” I say to her as much as to a younger Olivia Marie Cardell. I hear the words and accept them.
They transform me.
Clumsily, the blonde squirms out from under him and sobs softly. “Thank you.”
My voice is hollow and almost too chipper when I call back, “You’re welcome.”
She sprints off the boat, carrying her shoes in her hands.
It doesn’t take but a moment for Reggie to go still, and as the time ticks by, I stare at him. This creature that once infected my life. That stole my innocence and sense of worth.
But as the light fades from his eyes, mine grow brighter.
I tilt my head in wonderment… I thought I might feel angry or scared. Perhaps sad.
Instead, it’s almost as if it all happened to someone else and I just rescued her. The way I wished someone had done for me all those years ago.
Vanq appears like smoke behind me. His gloved hand wraps around mine, sliding the blade away. With its hint of familiarity, his deep voice soothes me as he says, “He didn’t ruin anything.”
For the first time, I know that to be the truth.
Instead of keeping my knife, he slides it into my pocket. Electricity sparks between us. This man gave me the courage to do what I had only fantasized about doing for so many nights…
He didn’t save me; he gave me the tools I needed to save myself.
Despite his unconventional ways, he’s taught me how to feel like me again.
When I face him, he lifts my mask and pockets it. I want to kiss him. To fall inside of him. To be enmeshed with him. Become one.
But when I attempt to raise my fingers to his face, he grabs them.
He catches me mid-motion and slings me into his arms like I weigh nothing. With a hypnotic swing to his step, he carries me below deck and toward the bedroom. The place where it all once happened.
“You want it here?” His voice is a raw growl.
My body hums with the need for his touch. “Yes. I want you to fuck me here. Make me forget—”
“No.” The single word arrests me, commanding my full attention. He lays me down on the white comforter, moonlight spilling like silver across my trembling body. The masked silhouette looms above—possessive, controlled. Mine.
“I won’t let you forget. I’m going to make you remember us instead,” he whispers fiercely, hands sliding slowly, deliberately toward my jeans.
In a fury of passion, I reach for his hoodie to rip it off. He lets me while he’s tugging down my pants along with my panties.
I don’t even care that he won’t let me touch the mask. My lips find where his would be, and we kiss through the fabric—breath against breath, hungry and blind. His lungs huff air inside me as his body lies on top of mine.
He gets his jeans down to mid-thigh and strokes his firm cock.
“I have an IUD,” I blurt—like this is some casual hookup instead of a blood-drenched fever dream.
His motion freezes as he hovers just over me, my thighs parted for him. With a small chuckle, he says, “I’ll rip it out. I’m knocking you up as soon as possible.”
Before I can protest, he plunges inside, and I arch back at the fullness of him.
“Vanq… Tell me your real name,” I whimper.
“Fuck… Shit.”
His body shudders as he collapses onto me, holding me tighter. If he goes any deeper, I think I’ll come easily. But he stops. Burying his face in my neck, he groans low and deep into my skin, moisture beads forming where he breathes me in.
Pulses from his cock fill me to the brink as heat spills from where we’re joined. He lifts onto his elbows, the mask scanning my face.
I timidly ask, “D-Did you just come?”
“Stay right there, my queen.”
I’m prepared to tell him it happens to every guy. That I’m not disappointed, but before I can even form a word, he slides down to my core, lifts the bottom part of his mask and shoves his lips onto my pussy like he’s famished.
“Oh my god!” I squeal as he licks his cum out of me. Then, he stuffs his full tongue into my hole, following it with his fingers, diving as deep as they can go.
“There’s that string. I feel it.” He tugs on the end of my birth control until it shifts painfully.
Hurriedly, I grasp his forearm. “Don’t. Don’t you dare.”
His head tilts. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep. Or better—tied up and left to scream.”
From this angle, I can’t even protest, especially when he returns to sucking on my clit. I fall back onto the pillows and roll my pussy all over his face, the stubble from his beard scratching the places that Elliot’s did, too. Both of them… They’re both so…
Just don’t say the wrong name, Olivia. Focus.
“V…I’m going to come…”
As soon as I’m about to explode, he stops, then hurriedly gets on top of me, his dick again hard and ready. Without stopping, he plunges to the hilt.
“Come all over me. I want everything you have.”
And I do. Thoughts of anyone else. Of the hurt and pain from before. It all fades until it’s just me and my shadow fulfilling every need I have in this moment.
“Vanq!”
His orgasm is smoother this time as he joins me, both of us panting breaths into the still night. The only sound is the rocking of the boat against the dock and the subtle waves splashing against the side.
He lifts me to sit while still buried deep inside me. Our faces are only an inch apart. If only he’d let me see him…
Instead, he presses his forehead to mine for a moment, our mouths dangling close together.
With barely a whisper, he breathes, “We need to go.”