Chapter 79
“What?”
Death? She was ready for death?
I was right.
“No,” she chokes, attempting to recover from the orgasm I just ripped away from her.
My mind races to catch up, trying to make some rational fucking conclusion to what I just heard. But all I hear is “death" echoing around in my empty head, screamed in her distressed voice. “What did you just say?”
“No, no, no, no. That’s not what I meant. Fuck.” Her voice is panicked. Good. She should be fucking riddled with fear because of the shit that just fell from her lips.
“You wanted to die?” My hollow heart rips apart at the seams she used to piece me back together. “How could you?” My voice breaks. “You did this to me. Fucking ruined me! And you were just going to abandon me?”
“No, Rip. Listen to me,” she begs, tears accumulating in her hazel eyes. They shine in the pink light, swelling around the rims of her lashes, threatening to spill.
“How fucking dare you!” I bellow.
Her elevated cries fade into the background as I retreat inward, the whip in my hand burning my palm.
She thinks she can do this to me? Make me feel, make me fall, then leave me broken and bleeding? I was supposed to ruin her, shatter her so thoroughly she’d never recover.
I think I’ll do just that.
The tails of the flogger crack off her ass with a force I know I shouldn’t use, but I’m lost, untethered.
Over and over, I take this pain she caused out on her. Whipping the leather across her beautifully blooming skin.
Her moaning screams are music to my ears. Even as I lose control, she revels in the cataclysmic culmination of my fucked up emotions.
I’m spiralling deep into a cavern I rarely ever venture into.
The lines have blurred so thoroughly, I don’t know when the plan faded away and my actions became my own.
When pleasing her became my conscious choice and not a way to eventually ruin her.
I don’t know who I fucking am anymore. She’s fucked up the very foundation I stand upon, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I don’t know if I hate it or I fucking like it.
All I know is I’m furious with her for putting me in this position.
“What have you done to me?” I roar, voice cracking as I crash back into my body.
Something yawns open in my chest, the agony so insurmountable I know I’ll never be able to escape it.
I lash the flogger across her mangled tattoo, and she screams my name in the most glorious pitch.
“Pause,” she firmly states, but that’s not her safeword.
“Why?” I demand. “Why did you do this to me? What did I do to deserve it?”
I raise the flogger again. “Wait!” Rose shouts, something in her voice registering in my brain. “Dinosaur! Dinosaur! Dino—“
“What!” I snap, the growl ripping from my throat.
“You don’t understand. Please, just listen to me. If when I’m done, you wish to continue, I’ll accept the lashes.”
My body quakes as the fury starts to leak from my system. I nod shallowly, giving her the silence she needs to spew whatever shit she came up with while I was fucking crumbling.
“I may have taken the flowers without thinking it through. But I didn’t want to be vulnerable again.
If I had grabbed them when I first got to Bleakcrest, maybe I could have avoided everything I went through.
I don’t know, it’s in the past now. But I didn’t want to feel unprotected again.
I’ve always had something on me, ever since the first time.
It’s stupid, I know, but it made me feel better. ”
“Okay, so…what? You were going to poison yourself?”
“I thought about it.”
“Rose…”
“I don’t think I’d actually do it.”
“You don’t think? Well, that’s reassuring.”
“The weight of everything is crushing, I wanted to not feel it.”
“Couldn’t come to me for help?”
“I didn’t need to, you were already there.”
“Sorry for fucking caring.”
“No, shut up, fuck. Stop taking what I say the wrong way.”
Staying silent, I gesture with my hand for her to please, continue.
“I didn’t need to turn to you for comfort, because you were already there. Forever chasing away the negativity wrapped around me like a noose.”
Her words settle over me, the flogger falling to the floor. My eyes rove over her abused skin, nausea barrelling up my gullet.
I dart across the room, ripping the mask from my face. It drops to the floor as my knees hit the concrete, guts heaving into a tiny trash can.
I can’t believe I did that to her. I abused her out of anger—fucking beat her because I let my feelings consume me, cloud my judgement.
“Ripley…” she softly calls across the distance between us. “Are you okay?”
Am I okay? I’m not the one with an innumerable amount of welts threatening to bleed.
“Are you?” I rasp in response, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
“I’m fine. Come here,” she pleads.
Rising from the floor, I move back to her, brightening the lights along the way.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I’m so fucking sorry, flower.” Her skin looks so much worse in the light. It brings me no satisfaction, just a suffocating dose of self-loathing.
I raise my hand to undo her binding, but she pulls away. “I’m not done.”
My heart drops to the cold, unforgiving floor, and I half debate crushing it beneath my foot.
Backing away slightly, so I keep my hands to myself, annoyance laces my tone, “What else could you possibly have to tell me?”
She looks away, digging her teeth into her bottom lip.
“You didn’t throw the flowers out, did you?”
Looking back to me, she replies, “No.”
“Where are they?” If she doesn’t tell me, I’ll tear the fucking house apart until I find them, and she can stay tied up here while I do it.
“I’m not going to use them…on myself.”
“Then why do you need them?”
“Protection…revenge.”
“Protection from what, exactly? You have me. If someone dangerous comes after you, you won’t have time to poison them. That’s why I gave you a phone and a gun.”
“I know.”
“Then, what?” Rose’s words register, the path to what she means appearing clearly before me. “What did you do?” A chilling smile spreads across her pillowy lips, as her darkening autumn gaze is unwavering. “Rose?”
“I killed them.”
“Them? Who? When?” Her silence is unsettling, a cold seeping into my bones. “Flower…did you kill Shantel?”
Slowly, she nods, a deep rooted tension dissipating at the confession.
“Why? Were you jealous? She meant less than nothing to me.”
“You think I’d commit murder over something as trivial as jealousy?”
“Then, why? Why would you hurt Bucky like that? His parents?”
“I don’t care, Rip. I know I should, but I just don’t. Not when it comes to you.”
“Baby…” I’m fucking torn, so unfathomably fucking angry at her for this, for hurting my best friend in a way I can’t fix, can’t reveal.
“Ripley, I’d conjure her from the dead if I could, just so you could watch her demise this time. I’d skin her alive if I thought it would bring you peace, healing.”
How can I be so enraged when she’s saying all the right things? My heart thawing and melting with every word that tumbles from her soft, lethal lips.
“He doesn’t deserve this,” I rasp, thinking of the pain in Bucky’s eyes, the way Kyle had to hold him back from diving off the cliff’s ridge to get to his sister’s contorted corpse.
“Maybe not, but you didn’t deserve what happened to you either.”
“You shouldn’t have done this.”
“Gaze upon my field of fucks and see that it is barren.”
“Rose…”
“No. Don’t do that. She hurt you, and not only was it eating you, it was taking bites from me too. You couldn’t see what I did. The way it affected you when you thought no one was watching. You tense at her voice, her laugh. Flinch when she gets too close. Fuck, your dick went soft inside me.”
“So you kill her?”
“Yes,” she growls, hooded eyes looking up at me. “Whip me, beat me, do whatever if it makes you feel better, or brings some retribution in your eyes for the pain I’ve caused, but I won’t say I regret it.”
“Why?”
“Why?” The word is a forced laugh. “What a stupid fucking question. You know why.”
"Why me?”
“What? Why you? Why do I love you? Are you fucking serious?” My unfocused eyes snap back, zipping to her angelic fucking face. “Because you’re fucking you. And it's somehow everything I ever wanted.”
Despite her putting me in an impossible position, the rage I desperately tried to cling to this entire time evaporates to nothing.
I’ll carry this secret to my grave for her.
Crawl across smouldering embers to prove my devotion to her.
Because she did this for me. Despite everything that she went through, what I plotted to fucking do to her, she chose to protect me, to end my fucking torment, no matter the cost.
“You love me?”
“Of course I fucking love you.”
"You’re not just saying that?” Fuck I sound like an insecure, love-struck fool.
“No,” she smiles softly, a blush warming her cheeks, “you’re it for me.”
“Really?”
“Yes."
She’s perfect. She’s fucked up. And she’s mine. Wholly. Completely. Irrevocably.
“Good, because no one’s going to love you for the things you’ve been hiding—except fucking me.”
Her soft smirk changes, shifting into a full-blown smile that shoots me like Cupid’s arrow, smack dab in the middle of the chest. “You love me?”
“Yes, I love you.”