Chapter 2 Confession 2 #4
“C’mon, Arden. You’re fucking smart, so use that brain,” he said.
“We aren’t stealing cars. We’re training.
He’s weeding out which of us is pretty enough to sell in the courtyard but sly enough to steal from our Buyers.
It’ll double his profit, offering a new revenue stream.
” His words jabbed into me like knives. He noticed my fear, and his dark look softened.
“You had to know you’d be repurposed. You don’t just grow out of being a Doll.
Viktor may not want you now that you’re an adult, but others will, and by proving you have the guts to go out and pull off theft for him, you made yourself even more valuable. We’re products. Nothing more.”
I rocketed off the rock. “Are you saying he’s going to sell me? Like he sells Rafe out to Buyers for years at a time?”
“Well,” Thorne said with a confused frown, “yeah.”
The blood drained from my face. I didn’t know what I expected him to say.
Maybe that Viktor would kill me, maybe that he’d lock me back in lace and restraints in his bed until I broke.
But not that. Not that every mile I drove, every car I boosted, every second I proved myself as more than a Doll that I was adding another tally to my price tag.
I thought I was freeing myself, but all I did was cage myself further.
I shook my head hard. “No. That’s not what this is. Leah wouldn’t let me join the thieving crew if she thought—”
Thorne cut me off with a stern look. “Leah lost the war against Viktor a long time ago. Probably when he forced her to beat the shit out of you for the first time, making her your Handler.” He leaned back on his hands again, the moon making his scar glow pale.
“I'm sorry,” he said, seeing my eyes burn.
He swallowed thickly. "You will be sold, Arden.
Not unless you choose, tonight, to leave despite your friend. "
My throat closed. “I’m not—” My voice broke, thin as paper. I started again, fiercer. “I could never leave Leah, not without knowing I was doing something to get her free, and I’m not a product.”
Thorne’s smile was small and sad. “Neither am I,” he said softly. “But tell me, Arden, when’s the last time we mattered more than what Viktor said we were?”
I folded my arms, turning my back to him and pacing down off the overhang and near the bike.
My breath felt trapped in my chest, and I inhaled deeply, trying to make my lungs expand and loosen.
I can't remember when I started running, just that I had to. I was dizzy, stumbling into the tree-line, barely registering Thorne calling after me. I wanted to scream, to vomit, to claw Viktor Shaw’s name out of the places where he had carved it years ago.
I felt so incredibly worthless knowing that, to a man like him, I was worth everything.
His adoration of me would only mean more pain, and I couldn't help but spiral further and further.
“Arden!” Thorne’s voice cracked across the clearing. His boots hit mulch, closing the distance.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” I shouted back, but it came out jagged, desperate. My heel caught on a root, and I went down hard, palms biting into damp soil. I stayed there on my hands and knees, chest heaving, unable to breathe past the truth he’d shoved in my face.
Thorne crouched beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him.
He didn’t touch me, not at first. Then, his hand closed around my arm.
“Get up, Arden,” he said. His tone was low, quiet.
“I didn’t bring you out here to hurt you.
I thought you knew what Viktor had planned for you, for all of us. ”
Tears stung in my eyes. “Then why did you bring me out here?” I demanded.
He stood then, hovering over me. He swallowed hard enough that I could make out the bob of his throat in the moonlight. “I thought you’d like a moment to escape,” he managed.
I pushed onto my feet, brushing leaves and dirt from my jeans.
“You mean you wanted to fuck me?” I spat, seeing the truth written in his features.
That’s always what it was with men. I knew it the moment he plucked that damn cigarette from my mouth, and I still got on his bike.
I didn’t know why. I guess part of me craved to be reckless.
Thorne didn’t deny it. His jaw tensed, his green eyes even darker than before.
“I think,” he said, measuring his words, “you want to fuck me, Arden. That’s why I brought you here.
Not because I planned to force myself on you or even ask that of you, but because you’ve been eye fucking me for over four years.
You keep putting yourself in my orbit, and… I guess I decided to let you stay.”
I stood across from him, the distance between us feeling infinite, and I let his words repeat through my mind.
They sunk into me, deeper and deeper. I guess I decided to let you stay.
As if he chose me. As if he thought I wanted him enough that he would be allowed to want me back.
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but the fact was I had watched him for a long time.
I’d wanted him in a way that I’d never wanted the men who visited my bedroom.
It was something I honestly didn’t know I’d ever feel.
I kind of thought the concept of lust and sex was warped and ruined for me forever.
“I’m not,” I start, tripping over my words, trying to find the right thing to say. I test a thousand sentences in my head, but none of them are what I mean to tell him. “I don’t,” I try again, before I curl my fingers into the leather of my sleeves and glare at the ground.
I’ve been fucked since before I had a word for it. I’ve been used as a Doll is meant to be used, and I know that Thorne, too, has been used in a similar but different way. No one in that house was immune to being sold off for sex. It was Viktor’s main play.
But I didn’t know intimacy, not really.
When I looked up from the ground and into Thorne’s eyes, I saw that he, too, was struggling.
It occurred to me, just like when he revealed that he had Kane like I had Leah, that he didn’t know what to do with what he was feeling either.
He was playing it cool. Trying to be the guy that had it figured out.
But he was from my same world, and our world had a very narrow view of what sex was. Hell, what a kiss was.
“Have you ever been with someone that wasn’t a Buyer?” I asked, my voice timid.
The wind rustled through the forest around us.
Thorne hesitated. Then, almost imperceptible in the low light, he shook his head no.
“Me either,” I whispered.
The words hung between us. It felt like an admission and a wound at the same time.
His shoulders shifted, as if the honesty sat wrong on his skin, but he didn’t look away.
I liked that about him. It made me want to be braver in the way I looked at others, too.
I'd always been taught to keep my eyes down, but Thorne showed me I could look freely and he'd match it.
I wrapped my arms tighter around myself, realizing how much of me wanted to step closer.
I was desperate to see what it felt like to be close to someone when no one else was watching.
Thorne dropped his gaze to the dirt between us, dragging the toe of his boot through the mulch and blowing out a heavy breath. He looked younger like that, almost uncertain. Then he lifted his eyes back to mine.
The clearing went still. The kind of still that makes you aware of your own breath, your own pulse. I thought if I lit my lighter right then, the tiny flame might have looked enormous, the only light in a world that had left us with nothing but each other and the ghosts of what we’d lost.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, stripped raw. “Maybe neither of us knows what the fuck we’re doing, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
His words sank into me, settling heavy in my chest. I didn’t move at first. Neither did he.
The air between us stretched taut, charged.
Then, slowly, I stepped closer. One inch, then another, until I could see the flecks of black in his green eyes.
He didn’t reach for me right away, but when my breath hitched, his hand lifted.
Rough fingers brushed my cheek, then slid into my hair, cupping the side of my face.
He held me there, his thumb hovering near my mouth, and I leaned into the weight of his palm.
We stayed that way, eyes locked, sharing a fragile silence, something we might have broken if we moved too fast. My heart beat so hard it hurt, and I realized he could probably feel it in the way my body leaned into his.
But still he just breathed with me, slow and steady, until it felt like the world was reduced to that small circle of heat where his skin met mine.
His thumbs swept over my cheeks several times, his eyes darting. “You know, you’ve got a shit ton of freckles,” he said, a startled laugh leaving me. “I never really noticed at the house because of your Doll paint.”
Then he let his hands drift into my curls.
“These, too. I like these,” he admitted, his voice rough.
No one had ever touched me that way before, not without expectation pressing down on it. My chest tightened, not from fear, but from the ache of not knowing what to do with gentleness.
I laughed again, softer, the sound catching in my throat. “You like freckles and curls? That’s what does it for you?”
His mouth curved, not into his usual smirk, but something quieter, harder to read. “I like that they’re yours,” he said simply.
The honesty in it nearly undid me. “You don’t know me,” I told him, breathless. “I barely know me.”
That seemed to interest him, his head tilting to the side as he continued to trace my face, his breath mingling with mine. “Me either. Maybe we can figure that out together, too.”
His forehead dipped closer, so close that his curls brushed mine, but still he didn’t kiss me. He just stayed there, his hand cradling my face like he was afraid I might disappear if he let go.
There was only the sound of our breathing, the faint rush of leaves overhead, and the thud of my heart trying to climb out of my chest. I thought if I moved even a fraction, if I let myself close that last inch, everything would change.
I was right.
I kissed Thorne, not knowing that one day, he’d destroy me. I kissed him, and I knew him as he was before he really became anything. I feel lucky now, to have known him like that, even despite the pain that came after.
The first drop of rain hit my cheek the instant our mouths brushed.
Then the sky gave way all at once, rain breaking open above us, soaking my curls, plastering his hair to his forehead.
We kissed anyway. It was messy and awkward, but it was also the most precious, perfect thing I'd ever experienced.
For so long, kissing had been a transaction, a performance, a command barked from someone who thought my body belonged to them.
But kissing Thorne wasn’t that. It was uncharted, trembling ground.
His lips moved against mine like he didn’t know the rules either, like we were both fumbling in the dark.
He tasted like smoke and water, the bitter edge of our shared cigarette cut through with the sweetness of rain sliding down his lips.
His hand held me steady at the jaw, his thumb shaking where it pressed against my cheekbone.
When I leaned closer, he answered by sinking deeper into me.
It wasn’t greedy or brutal, just there, giving back what I gave him, like we were teaching each other what a kiss could be when it wasn’t paid for.
I felt the scrape of his scar when our mouths shifted, that thin line of healed violence pressed against my skin.
It should’ve pulled me out of the moment, reminded me of what we were, of who owned us.
Instead it grounded me. He wasn’t perfect.
He wasn’t untouched. He was broken in his own way, and somehow that made it easier to let him touch the pieces I’d become.
The sound of it—the rain on leaves, the soft catch of our breath, the quiet press of mouths—was so small against the wide forest, but to me it felt loud.
Louder than the echo of everything we’d survived.
Louder than Viktor’s voice in my head. Loud enough that, for the first time, I believed love to be less of a concept and more of an aching seed that grows if a heart is open to it.
I curled my fingers in his jacket, clutching fistfuls of wet leather until my knuckles ached.
The material was wet under my hands, but beneath it he was steady and alive in a way that made my head spin.
My palms slid higher, tracing the shape of him; the broad span of his shoulders, the hard plane of his chest, the beat of his heart thrumming against my fingertips.
I wanted to know all of him, every ridge of bone and line of muscle, to map him like contraband I could hide away with the rest of my treasures.
My hands shook as they lingered over his ribs, and I realized with a jolt that it wasn’t from fear. It was want. Pure, terrifying want.
He tilted his head, deepening the kiss just slightly, and I swore I could feel him shiver when my fingers slipped up to his throat.
His pulse leapt against my touch, wild and uneven, and I had the dizzy thought that maybe he was just as undone as I was, both of us ruined by a single kiss in the rain.
It felt like I was outside of Viktor’s world entirely.
Just two young lovers in the woods. Nothing more.
Nothing less. And if I closed my eyes, I could almost believe that the world began and ended with the press of his mouth, the weight of his hand at my jaw, the thunder rolling overhead like it had come to bear witness.
When he finally pulled back, it wasn’t because he wanted to. We both needed to breathe. He stayed close, rain dripping from his lashes, his forehead resting against mine. His mouth ghosted the corner of my lips when he whispered, raw and almost broken, “Arden.”
For the second time in my life, someone said my name in a way that felt like a claiming.
First it had been Leah. Now it was Thorne.
I didn’t understand it completely, but I thought, as he took my hand and led me back to his bike, that names are hollow things—just words with no shape until someone slots themselves inside them, burrowing into the very core of who you are.
Then they become as much your identity as your name itself.