Chapter 12 #3
“Approve?” She slides closer, and there’s heat in her eyes now, a molten shimmer that wasn’t there before.
“It’s the first thing about you that makes perfect sense.
” She climbs into my lap again, and holy fuck if this isn’t my favorite thing in the world now…
“I feel a little stupid now, to be honest. I mean, you got your own damn name tattooed on you.”
She tugs my shirt up, exposing the four-leaf clover on my lower abdomen. “Conceded,” she raises an eyebrow with a smirk. “And the backstory, I don’t know why I didn’t guess it already. I mean, the cards were telling me—”
“Shut up and kiss me, tarot witch,” I cut her off with a grin.
One she mirrors as she leans forward. When her mouth finds mine, it’s different.
There’s no mask, no showmanship, no layers between us.
It’s raw and honest and hungry. I’ve kissed other women, but this—this is the first time I’ve felt one dig her nails into my ribs and into my soul at the same time.
Something clicks in my chest, dangerous and irreversible. Shit. I’m falling in love with this woman.
Her lips taste like tea she never finished, like adrenaline, like sin.
My hands find her hips, pull her closer.
Her body presses to mine, soft and strong, and I’m dizzy with it.
Her breasts press into my chest so hard, it’s the best kind of suffocation.
By the second, I feel myself lengthening in my pants.
The kiss escalates fast. Her hands rise over my chest, over my shoulders, digging into my back. My tongue invades her mouth and she lets out a heady sigh. I bite her lower lip, pulling her tighter against me, grinding myself against her. My pulse is a drum in my ears. And then—
She goes still.
Not subtle. A jolt. Like a deer catching the scent of a hunter. Her body stiffens against mine, and the fire in her kiss snuffs out.
I pull back instantly, every alarm in my head going off. Her eyes are wide, glassy, lips parted but not in invitation. My gut twists.
“Willow?” My voice is rough, but I keep it low, careful.
She swallows hard, shakes her head once. “I—” Her breath stutters, and she scrambles out of my lap back to the other end of the couch. “I just—”
I calm my breathing, swallow once, and shift, trying to ease the tight strain my dick is causing in my pants. But I hope she hears every ounce of conviction in my tone as I tell her, “It’s okay. We stop. Right here.”
Her lips tremble, her voice barely audible. “I want to be open with you, Lucky. I want… I want you. I just…”
And just like that, I know—this isn’t the end. Me finally sharing my full back story wasn’t the end of the confessions of the night. This is the start of something deeper, something jagged and raw. She’s about to hand me a piece of her soul, and I swear, I’ll hold it like gold.
She won’t look at me at first. Her hands twist together, fingers white at the knuckles. Willow Vale—executioner of predators, queen of sarcasm, witch with a blade in her boot—looks like she’s about to splinter into pieces.
I stay quiet. Every instinct screams at me to fill the silence, to make a joke, to promise her she doesn’t have to tell me. But I know better. If she’s going to trust me with this, she needs to do it on her own terms.
Finally, she whispers, “I’ve never told anyone this.” Her voice is raw, scraped thin.
I lean forward, my eyes fixed on hers, even if she isn’t looking at me right now. “I’ve got you, Willow. I’m listening.”
When she looks up, finally, her eyes are glistening, though not for one second does she actually look like she’s about to cry.
She looks like she’s about to end the world.
“I told you a little bit about it. Scratched the surface. But it was bad, Lucky,” she says.
The words stumble out like broken glass.
“I was young, eighteen, fresh out of high school. Totally naive. Never been in a relationship at that point. And there he was. His name was Porter Young. Like I said, he wasn’t my professor. But he was still faculty.”
Fuck. And here it is. I know it instantly. This, not just the cult Willow was born into, is her origin story. The power. The abuse. The reason Willow does what she does.
“He was young for a professor. He was charming. Handsome. Funny. He… knew how to hover. How to make you feel seen.”
Her jaw ticks, and she stares past me, eyes somewhere far away.
“We’d see each other in the halls, his classroom was across from my last of the day.
It was just saying hi at first. And then it was jokes.
Compliments. And then he invited me to coffee.
He went off on how he could see my potential.
That I was… different.” The disgust in her voice is sharp as a knife.
“It felt flattering at first. Stupid, right?”
“Not stupid,” I mutter. My fists clench on my knees. I want this Porter bastard to appear right here, right now, just so I can kill him.
She shakes her head but continues, words picking up speed like a car rolling downhill.
“He pulled me in. Slowly. Compliments. Little favors. Gifts. Then a hand on my shoulder. A touch on my back. Until suddenly I was in his office, and he was kissing me, and I thought… Fuck, I thought it was hot. And some young, na?ve part of me thought maybe this is what it’s supposed to be like. ”
Her eyes flick to mine, full of shame. And that just about kills me. Shame in her eyes, for something that was never her fault.
“It wasn’t. It was wrong. From the start. He pushed. He always pushed. Past what I was comfortable with. Past what I wanted, past what I could even process. And I—” her voice cracks— “I didn’t stop him.”
I move before I think, reaching across the couch, taking her hand. She squeezes back so hard it hurts. Good. Pain is better than the emptiness in her face.
“He took my virginity,” she says in an angry whisper.
“And I tried to convince myself that it was what I wanted, that he was good for me. But it wasn’t good.
It hurt. It was… dark. And every time after that, he always wanted to try something different.
He tried to frame it like he was teaching me, because I was inexperienced.
But I didn’t like it, the things he did, the things he made me do.
It was too much. But he just steamrolled me. ”
Her words keep growing quieter, and I feel something deep inside of me dying. But there’s something else waking up. Something molten. Something vengeful. Something demonic.
Porter Young. I sear that name into the back of my mind, carve it onto the backs of my eyelids. When I track him down, and I will… it won’t be pretty.
“It was three months of hell,” Willow whispers. “He did things I didn’t want, things I wasn’t ready for. And I let him, because he made me feel like I didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t just some guy. He was a teacher. Respected. Connected. If I said anything… I knew he’d ruin me.”
Her breath shudders out, but those tears in her eyes don’t budge.
Something in her expression hardens, goes darker.
And she looks just a little bit more like the Willow I know.
“Then I found out I wasn’t the only one.
There were two other girls. While he’d been sleeping with me, he was also doing the same thing with two other students.
And when I started digging, I realized… he’d done it to dozens. Years of it. Hidden in plain sight.”
I can barely see straight, the rage pounding through me like drums. My jaw aches from clenching it.
Willow swallows hard and those tears in her eyes disappear as she blinks.
“So, one night, I went to his office. He thought it was just another… another session. What he had in mind that night…” she shakes her head as her expression goes cold.
“He had ‘toys’ there. Things I’d said no to, but he wasn’t going to take my answer.
” Her voice goes flat, dead, and it chills me.
“Things escalated in his office. I said no again. And he put his hands on me. He was forceful. But there were two letter openers sitting on the edge of his desk. The old-style ones.”
Her gaze is fixed on the floor, but I can practically see it like a movie as she paints the picture. I don’t want to. I want to evaporate every word she’s saying from existence. But Willow is controlled, empty, cold recollection.
“I daggered him to his own desk,” she voices the words I knew were coming.
“Made him confess every name, every girl. He cracked like a twelve-year-old boy caught with porn. It felt good, making him face justice, making him feel even a little bit of the pain he’d made me feel.
But it wasn’t enough. He’d broken me. I cracked.
And I wanted him to know what he’d made me into. ”
This asshole was on the verge of raping Willow. Hell, he’d been doing non-consensual stuff to her for months, so he’d been doing it all along. Willow might feel like she turned into a monster that night. But it was fucking self-defense.
Willow’s eyebrows raise slightly, and something looks a little lighter in her expression.
“It wasn’t enough just to make him feel pain.
I looked around, and what was right there on his desk?
A plastic takeout bag. I didn’t even flinch when I grabbed it and yanked it over his head.
And something felt like it reset, like it righted in me, when he finally went limp. ”
The room feels ice-cold. The Strip’s neon paints her in pink and blue, like a stage light on a tragedy.
“The only man I’ve ever slept with,” she says, voice going rock steady, “was also my first kill.”
Silence. Except for my heart slamming against my ribs.
I want to break things. I want to find every bone in Porter Young’s body and snap them one by one, even if it means digging him out of the dirt to do it. But all I can do is sit here, holding her hand like it’s the only lifeline left.