12. Kai #2
I can feel her heartbeat fluttering against my chest.
So desperate. So terrified.
But she’s not fighting as hard as she should be…the Haven I knew could scratch and claw her way out of anything.
Her breath hitches when I lean in.
“You’re scared because I know how to hurt you,” I whisper. My hand slides from her wrist to her hip, fingers digging in possessively. “You’re scared because you want me to hurt you. Even after all these years, Haven, it still scares you how much you need me.”
She tries to shake her head, but I catch her chin, forcing her to look at me. Those blue eyes are wide, pupils dilated.
“Liar,” I breathe, and her lips part on a soft gasp. “Your body remembers what I used to do to you in those woods. You might have forgotten how you’d beg for more, even through your tears…but your body remembers.”
“All I remember is being your punching bag,” she says, blue eyes blazing with barely tempered fury.
“If you hated it so much, why the fuck did you keep coming back for more, huh?”
She licks her lips, eyes narrowing, but the anger in them fades like a flame starved of oxygen. “You’re all I had, Kai.”
A pulse of something—guilt, shame, regret, who the fuck knows?—tightens my chest. But I know this game. She’s played it so many times before. Poor little Haven, the unloved girl.
“Until I wasn’t anymore, right?”
She opens her mouth, but I don’t let her speak. I’ve had enough of her poisonous lies.
“Listen to me, Heavenly. You’re gonna get in your car, and you’re gonna drive out of here, and you’re not even gonna look in your fucking rearview mirror.”
Another sound, this one definitely a protest because it’s accompanied by a furious wriggle of her hips, like she’s trying to break out of my grip.
“Shhh, shhh,” I whisper, coiling my arm tighter around her middle like a python. “You’re not listening, Heavenly.” My voice becomes a frustrated rasp.
She goes still. The breath puffing against my fingers from her nose comes in short, hard huffs.
I brush my lips against the shell of her ear. “You stay the fuck away from this place, or I’ll have some or other irregularity in your paperwork surface. Something Bobby will have to come sort out in person.”
She gives one savage jerk in my grip and sinks her nails into my arm.
“You don’t want that, do you? Daddy Dearest staggering in here, demanding to know what the fuck is so important he had to stop hitting his pipe?”
The plan had been percolating in my brain since last night when she told me to go fuck myself. I know for a fact he used to cuff her upside the head whenever she talked back to him.
But it’s not her fear I’m after this time.
It’s her pride.
Bobby didn’t scare her as much as he embarrassed her.
Riversiders are eighty percent pride, twenty percent stubbornness.
The fight leaves her body like I’d been holding a marionette doll and someone cut the strings. She slumps forward, her weight falling against me.
My cock hardens even more in my lap, pressure building.
I slide my hand off her mouth. I lean back, grabbing her shoulders, holding her up for inspection to see how deep the knife slid in.
Oh yeah, I hit a nerve all right. Judging from how pale her face is, maybe even a fucking artery.
I give her a soft shake, and her head just flops, like she doesn’t have the strength to keep her neck stiff.
“There it is,” I murmur, a smile tugging at my lips as I study her ashen face, the smudges under her eyes, the dark mark on her jaw where she must have hit the car last night when I—
Fuck.
Didn’t know it would leave a bruise.
A surge of nausea tightens my stomach.
Had I really been that rough with her?
I don’t know what’s fucking me up more…that I hurt her, or that it left a mark for everyone to see.
The whiplash from that thought is swift and brutal.
It doesn’t fucking matter.
It’s finally sinking in.
It worked. All of it. Especially this last, fatal blow.
She’s putty in my hands, limp and docile and…so fucking broken looking.
I grab her chin, and she winces at the pressure I apply to that bruise. Her eyelashes flutter, but she keeps her eyes averted. Doesn’t want me to see her pain, or can’t stand looking at the man who’d dare turn against her like this?
As if she hadn’t seen this coming.
I thought I used to live in the clouds, but this girl is fucking delusional. We were taught back in high school already how every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Someone should remind her how physics works.
Right here.
Right fucking now.
“I want to believe you’ll never come back,” I say, my voice as hard as my cock. “But lying is as easy as breathing for you.”
She seems to come awake, body flinching. But her eyelids are at half-mast, her head lowered, as she says, “I’ll do whatever you want.”
Those words send a jolt of déjà vu through me.
…please, Kai. I need this. I’ll do whatever you want…
And it gets me hard. So fucking hard.
Christ, how fucked up am I?
I force her head up, trying to get her to look me in the eye so I can lord this moment over her, but her eyes just shift to the window.
Looking for an escape.
“Yeah, we both wish you’d made different life choices, Heavenly. But here we are.”
Her throat moves. “Please let me go,” she murmurs without a trace of emotion.
I pinch harder.
Her eyes squeeze shut. “Please.”
All she wanted to do was get away from me. But then she came back…except, it wasn’t for me, was it?
That fucking pisses me off.
I might have left Riverside when we were kids, but I was always there for her. Right up to the point where she made it clear she’d been using me, that she had no problem crumpling me up and tossing me like a paper napkin.
Being with Haven is like pouring water down a drain. You just keep giving more and more of yourself…but it never fills up. You’re left with nothing to show for your effort.
It’s time she paid me back.
She flinches when I knock off her cap, but her eyes stay shut until I grab her small ponytail and start pushing her head down.
Startled blue eyes pop open.
I press my thumb against her bottom lip, tugging down hard, pulling her jaw open.
“See that cock down there?” I grate out, glancing down at the bulge beneath my sweatpants. “You’re gonna suck it until I’m convinced you’re not lying.”
Anger fills her eyes. “No fucking way!”
I grab her and shove her under the table. She cries out when something—an arm, a leg—hits the edge of the wood, and immediately tries to scramble out from under it.
I slam my sneaker into the central table leg, and she runs into it. She turns and tries to go the other way, but I stick my leg out on that side too. When she ducks to go under, I grab her hair and wrench her back.
There’s just enough space between the bench and the table for a small sliver of light to hit her face as I arch her neck back so she’ll look at me.
Both her hands go to her hair, Haven wincing as she tries to untangle my fingers. She stops when I shove my hand down the front of my sweatpants and drag out my cock.
Shock, then horror, crawls onto her face.
“No,” she whispers.
Her eyes fly up to mine like she’s trying to find evidence that this is just some silly joke, that I’m going to laugh and push her away and tell her to ‘shove off’ like I did when I was a kid.
I couldn’t, even if I tried.
As soon as she looked at my cock, I wanted her lips wrapped around it.
There’s confusion on her face, like she’s trying to convince me she doesn’t know how sucking dick works.
“You hit your head so hard last night, you forget how this works, Heavenly? Open your mouth and swallow me down your throat.”