Chapter 7 Willow
WILLOW
In my dreams, I see the three of them.
Ransom. Malice. The one called Vic.
Malice is angry, punching a wall, slamming his fist into the drywall and leaving a dent behind.
Ransom is smiling, but somehow it doesn’t reach his blue-green eyes.
He talks, but I can’t hear what he’s saying over Malice’s rage.
The quiet one, Vic, just stands there, taking it all in.
His eyes are cold and unreadable, and he doesn’t speak or move.
He might as well be a robot, observing and not interacting, and it sends a chill down my spine.
The Russian man is there too. One minute, he’s on the bed, pinning me down. His hands are on my body, touching me, groping me roughly, and no matter how hard I fight to get away, he keeps holding me in place.
“You asked for this,” he snarls in his thick accent. “You can’t say no.”
In the back of my mind, I know he’s right. I know I can’t turn him down, even though I don’t want this. I don’t want it.
I yell for him to get off me, but no sound comes out.
Then, almost like he teleported there, the massive Russian is across the room. His body is crumpled on the floor, and there’s blood everywhere. It soaks into the floorboards and creeps its way across the scuffed wood toward the bed.
I scramble up, every muscle in my body tensed to run.
But then the three men who killed the Russian converge on me.
Ransom helps me off the bed, his grip firm but almost gentle. Then Malice rips me out of his grasp. He pins me to the wall, one hand at my throat, the other holding his shiny, dark gun.
I tremble, opening my mouth again, wanting to beg him to let me go. Ready to promise that I won’t say anything. I swear I won’t.
But I can’t make the words come out. All I can do is watch him, my gaze locked on his.
A fierce, wild rage burns in his eyes, and I feel like I’m falling into the swirling gray of his irises, unable to look away.
They’re beautiful, in a way that a dark thunderstorm on the horizon is beautiful.
Full of chaos and destruction, but breathtaking too.
All of him is beautiful, just like all of him is terrifying, and it makes him mesmerizing in a strange way.
The gun is aimed at my head, and I finally manage to break eye contact with him and squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting to see the moment when he pulls the trigger. He presses the barrel to my temple, and I flinch, my breath coming faster.
“Please,” I whisper.
His breath fans across my face, a soft gust of air. “Please what?”
“Don’t… kill me.”
There’s a long moment of silence, and I’m sure he’s not going to listen to my plea. After all, I’ve seen too much. Why would he let me live?
He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t care about me.
To him, I’m just what the Russian man described their mother as. A piece of trash to be discarded.
But then he shifts his grip on me a little, and the gun leaves my temple. I let out a small sigh of relief, then gasp as the cool metal of the barrel touches between my breasts, tracing the jagged tears the Russian left in my slip.
Is he going to shoot me in the heart instead? Will I die faster that way?
“Open your eyes.”
His voice is low and rough, and I obey the command without thinking, as if it’s an instinctual response. My eyelids fly open, and I stare up into his stormy gray eyes, breathing so hard that I can feel the gun digging deeper into my chest with every inhale.
My entire body is tensed, ready for the moment when he fires, but instead of pulling the trigger, he drags the gun down even lower. The smooth metal glides over my stomach and along my upper thigh, and I choke on my next breath when he moves it to one side so that it slides between my legs.
“What are you—”
The question dies with a squeaked noise as he grazes the barrel of the gun over my clit. My heart is pounding and my skin is prickling all over, as if I’m about to be struck by lightning.
“I’m not going to kill you,” the man named Malice murmurs in that rough voice of his. “Don’t worry.”
I am worried, though.
I’m extremely fucking worried, because he’s got a gun between my legs, rubbing circles against my clit.
I’m worried because… I’m getting wet.
Nothing about this should turn me on. It’s so fucked up, so wrong. But when he eases the barrel of the gun away from my clit, I find myself moving my hips, chasing the touch of the hard, smooth metal.
Malice doesn’t react to that, and he also doesn’t stop. He gives me what I’m silently asking for, slipping the barrel of the gun between my folds and then rubbing it against my clit again, smearing the gathering wetness over my skin.
I’m still trembling, just like I was when he first pressed the gun to my temple, but now I think it’s for a different reason.
“Please,” I whisper, but I don’t know what I’m begging for now.
Do I want him to stop? Or to keep going?
Do I want him to spare me or ruin me?
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, his voice like gravel. “I know what you need.”
Slowly, he presses the gun into me, deeper and deeper. It hurts at first, since I’ve never had anything other than my fingers in there before, and the gun isn’t really meant to be there at all.
But Malice doesn’t stop. He keeps pushing until he meets the resistance of my hymen.
A smirk crosses his darkly handsome face, and I gasp sharply when he shoves the barrel in that last bit, ripping through my hymen, taking my virginity.
I writhe against the wall, and it’s more pain than anything at first. I’m wet, but the gun is big and oddly shaped, pressing against my walls and amplifying that tender, sore feeling inside me.
The longer Malice keeps fucking me with the barrel, though, the better it starts to feel. I stop wincing and start moaning softly, heat building between my legs.
He keeps working it in, going as deep as he can, and eventually, I can’t stop the moans that pour from my lips.
My hips roll against every one of his thrusts, heat building low inside me.
I’m so close to coming, so close to falling apart, riding the knife’s edge of adrenaline and euphoria, desire and terror.
Then, just as my legs start to shake, Malice pulls the gun out, leaving me empty.
The barrel of it is covered with my arousal and smeared with small streaks of blood from where he tore my hymen, and Malice looks right at me as he drags his tongue up the length of it.
My mouth drops open, disgust and a strange, sick sort of arousal churning in my stomach. That’s wrong. That’s so, so, so wrong.
But why does the predatory gleam in his eye and the animalistic way he licked the gun make some part of me feel drawn to him?
His pupils dilate as he watches my reaction, the pitch black color overtaking the gray of his irises. The other two men have been standing behind him this entire time, and now they step closer, their gazes just as intent on me as his is.
They surround me, boxing me in as they move as a unit, and I don’t have anywhere to go. I’m stuck between them and the unyielding plaster of the wall, my heart pounding and my chest heaving as I try to remember how to breathe.
The one named Ransom cocks his head, his bright blue-green eyes seeming to see too much of me.
“You’re bound to us now, little bird,” he murmurs, his tone oddly gentle. “You have to keep your mouth shut.”
“I will,” I promise, breathless. “I swear. I won’t say anything. Please.”
Malice grips my chin and closes the remaining distance between us. His dark eyes scan my face, like he’s looking for any trace that I’m lying or holding something back.
He’s so close that our noses are almost touching, his muscled body looming over mine.
“If you don’t keep your word, we’ll find out. And we’ll wreck you,” he tells me, running his thumb along the line of my jaw. “Do you want to be wrecked?”
I gasp, surging up in the bed, my heart beating so hard in my chest that I can hear the blood rushing in my ears over the sound of my ragged breathing.
I’m soaked in sweat, and my hair is a tangled mess. The sheets are wrapped around me, twisted in a way that makes me feel trapped. Adrenaline is pouring through my veins, and I have to force myself to take deep, even breaths to calm the frantic race of my heart.
“It was just a dream,” I murmur, shaking my head as I press the heels of my hands to my temples. “Just a dream, Willow. Just a dream.”
Finally, the tension in my shoulders and chest starts to ease a little, and I glance over at the clock.
It’s earlier than I would normally wake up, but not by much.
I’m grateful the dream didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night, because I know there’s no way I’d be able to go back to sleep now.
After a few more moments of trying to gather myself, I get up, dragging my exhausted ass to the shower. It’s not blood and dirt this time, but I need to wash the sweat off me. Plus, I still don’t really feel clean from last night.
I let the shower run a little colder than I usually would, trying to shake off the last of that… nightmare and clear my thoughts.
After everything that’s happened, it feels weird to be doing anything normal or mundane, but after my shower, I force myself to pour a bowl of cereal. Each bite tastes like sawdust in my mouth, but I have to eat.
Besides, the milk is on its last legs, and I need to finish it before it goes bad.
Thoughts like that are still there, still in the back of my mind like they usually are, but overlaid on top of them, glowing like a neon sign in my head, is the fact that I watched a man die last night.
“Stop thinking about it, Willow,” I mutter to myself. “Just get up and go to school.”
My school bag is right where I left it yesterday, before everything went down, and I grab it, hurrying out of the apartment to catch the bus to campus.
It’s the same route I take every day, but I feel so disconnected from it. From everything. My stomach is in knots, and I’m glad I didn’t eat more than cereal.