37. Riley
RILEY
Isaid the wrong thing. I only meant to relieve some of Aron’s obvious stress. But the moment the words are out of my mouth, his whole face changes. Anything that was human in it withdraws and disappears, leaving it harsh and devoid of any emotion except for silent, simpering rage.
“Riley,” he addresses me, his voice cold and lifeless. “What the fuck do you think this is, huh?”
He approaches the bed, looming over me. I refuse to back off. I will not let him scare me away. I will not let him intimidate me into pretending that this thing between us is meaningless. It is not for me. And I have to believe it isn’t for him either, no matter how much he might try to deny it.
“Do you think I’m your boyfriend, Riley? Do you think this is a relationship?”
I don’t protest when he grabs my hair, wrapping it around his fist.
“Do you think I care about what you want? About keeping you happy?”
He yanks at my hair, but I don’t as much as wince.
“Do you think this is some fucking fairy tale where I fall in love with you despite everything, and we live happily ever after?”
Keep your dignity. Be honest. Be vulnerable. He likes you vulnerable.
“I was hoping for that, yes.”
His mouth twists in a humourless, lop-sided smirk, and his fingers close around my throat, their grip so merciless that I gag. But I keep my eyes locked onto his.
“Idiot girl. Whatever the fuck gave you that idea?”
I wince at the insult and the mocking cruelty in his voice.
“The way you were with me.” My voice may be choked and fragmented, but I manage to keep it steady.
He lifts me by my throat like I weigh nothing—like I am nothing—my knees barely touching the bed.
“When?” he demands harshly, his face inches from mine, his breath hot on my lips. “When I kept you in a cage? When I made you kneel in gravel until your knees bled? When I painted the inside of your holes with my cum like you only existed to absorb my messes?”
He releases me in a vaguely disgusted motion, like he’s letting go of something repulsive he touched by accident. I crumple onto the bed in a heap, legs splayed underneath me.
“You hurt me in some ways, but you healed me in ways that mattered much more,” I say quietly, willing my eyes to stay dry.
“And I think you know that.” I forget how to breathe, the words like razors in my mouth.
“I think that underneath that skull mask, there is a very kind, caring man who wants to love someone, even more than he wants to be loved back.” My heart is galloping, and my vision is spotting as I force out an admission through my lips that I swore I’d never say out loud.
“And he is loved back. Because when I saw that man, Aron, I ... fell in love with him. I fell in love with you.”
His face changes again. Human emotion returns only to die, to disappear in an agonising, violent way that seems permanent and irreparable. I recoil inwardly, desperation clawing at me from all sides.
“You shouldn’t have,” he tells me coldly. “But you were meant to.”
I wither on the inside, the first promise of tears a salty sting in my throat like the smell of ozone in the air before a storm.
“What do you mean?” I ask, needing to know the answer, but not wanting to know it at the same time.
“What do you think?” he retorts, and when I stay silent, processing my shock, he elaborates, “Riley, I like fucking you. But that doesn’t mean I like you.” A cruel sneer carves itself onto his face like an ugly gash.
“You acted like you did,” I protest. “More and more often.”
I rack my brain, thinking about what first made me feel there was something between us, but it’s like reaching in the dark. My mind is a jumbled mess, confused and unreliable.
“Yes. And I did that deliberately, you daft bitch. To be able to look you in the eye and tell you that I played you. That I manipulated you and your silly little feelings.” His voice is sharp and relentless, forcing me to hear him out even when I don’t want to. And every word is like a physical blow.
“All I ever wanted was to make you feel as you made me feel all those years ago. Betrayed. I’ll never forget who you are. You’ll never be anything more to me than a thing I like to fuck. Is that fucking clear already?”
A shameful half-sob claws its way up my throat. He gets on the bed with me, forcing me back until I’m lying on the pillows, trapped underneath him. He is above me, and everywhere I look, like a cage.
“That’s all you are and all you’ll ever be. My toy. My pet. Here to be rewarded for obedience, punished for defiance, and discarded at the side of a road somewhere when it stops being fun for its master.”
Tears streaming down my face, I shake my head over and over like a child protesting. “I don’t believe you. I do not believe you!”
His smile only grows nastier, his tone more vicious. The man I got to know over the past few weeks is gone. Back is the Necromancer as I first met him, leering at me, threatening me, excited to hurt me.
He undresses me mechanically, and I’m so stunned that I barely register it when he reaches into the bedside table drawer to take something out. I don’t protest when metal bites into my wrists, and he cuffs both my arms to the headboard. I have no resistance left. He crushed it all.
“I’ll make you believe me, Hotshot,” he growls, the twisted anticipation in his voice clear and unmistakable. “If it’s not enough to tell you, then let me fucking show you.”
He yanks my legs further apart, exposing my pussy to him, opening me up. I want to say something, but my voice breaks apart in a sob.
“Stop crying.” His eyes clash with mine.
“You’re not the first bitch to go stupid for a man’s cock.
” His fingers brush my entrance, rough and proprietary.
His touch isn’t a caress—it’s a claim, a condemnation.
He chuckles menacingly when he finds me, as he knew he would, swollen and completely soaked.
“Your pathetic tears would be a lot more convincing if your cunt wasn’t weeping for me even harder at the same time.”
I chew the inside of my cheek until I taste blood, but it’s no use, the tears keep flowing. I can’t stop them. I’m a snivelling mess. And that helplessness, more than his rough treatment, ignites my own anger.
“And what you’re saying would be a lot more convincing if you ever kept your word,” I spit at him, struggling against my bonds.
“You said you’d kill me, and you didn’t.
You said you’d make me suffer, and instead you did the opposite.
” I scoff, terror and satisfaction fusing in my veins as I watch the colour drain from his face.
“What a letdown. The big, scary Necromancer, a legend among men and the monster of my nightmares ... is all bark and no bite.”
His eyes turn dark like dying stars turning into black holes, until they become bottomless pits of destruction.
“You want bite, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” I challenge him even as tremors rush through me, visceral fear pooling in my belly.
“Then I’ll give you bite.”
Sharp pain cuts across my cheek, and before I know what’s happening, his hand crushes my windpipe. My throat collapses in his grip. Then even worse agony distracts me when his teeth sink into my shoulder and soon something warm trickles down my chest.
I try to scream, but he’s robbed me of my voice. My mouth is wide open, but no sound comes out except for strangled gurgling.
And even that dies down when he leans over me, the tip of his cock aligns with my pussy, and he rams inside of me in one brutal thrust, hitting my cervix.
He gives me no time to recover. He sets a punishing pace, rutting into me, the searing burn of his intrusion completely overwhelming, and the cold, hard pressure of his piercing maddening and unrelenting.
A half-formed thought floats through my mind, a realisation that this whole time, every time he fucked me, he’s been holding back.
That he was careful not to hurt me the way he’s hurting me now.
And the most messed-up part of it all is that I can’t tell whether I feel discarded now that he no longer wants to protect me from himself, or whether I feel robbed.
Robbed of all the times he could have fucked me this way and didn’t.
I gag harder, eyes popping, pressure building at my temples, and unwanted, savage pleasure already unspooling in my core.
Oh god.
I can’t let him make me come. Not like this. For all that remains that I still value in myself, I cannot let him have that victory, too.
I close my eyes, trying to distance myself from him, trying to focus on the pain—the blood vessels in my neck and face on the verge of rupturing, the burn of the fresh bite on my shoulder, the sensation of being torn apart with each thrust.
But it’s no use.
My nerve endings are sizzling with bliss I’m powerless to stop, rushing up my whole body, tingling all over.
“You’re about to come, aren’t you?”
“No,” I mouth.
“You’re a liar, you dirty whore. I can feel your cunt spasming, so much I couldn’t pull out if I tried.” His voice is coarse and husky, and so full of loathing it forces fresh tears into my eyes.
“I hate you,” I rasp.
He tries to chuckle, but the sound morphs into a moan, jarringly helpless and full of twisted surrender, so at odds with his words.
“I—”
Thrust.
“Fucking—.”
Thrust.
“Hate—”
Thrust.
“You—”
Thrust.
“Too.”
With a fragmented groan, he crashes into me and spills inside of me at the same time as my body clamps and dissolves around him, electricity surging through me, so powerful that, combined with the oxygen deprivation, it makes my vision go completely dark.
I black out.
When I come to, Aron is already up, tucking his cock into his trousers. He casts a brief look in my direction. When he sees me conscious and looking back at him, a ghost of something like relief flickers through his face. But it’s gone so fast I’m not even sure I’ve seen it.
He throws his automatic rifle over his shoulder, adjusting the strap as he marches towards the door.
“Wait!” I croak. “Untie me, you asshole.”
But he walks out of the door without looking at me or saying another word. Leaving me as I am, bound, half-choked to death, bruised, a trail of blood running down my chest from his bite, my pussy exposed, and my thighs sticky with the mixture of his cum and more blood.
Not just empty but hollowed out.
Not just alone but abandoned.
Done for.