Chapter Forty-Six Charlotte
Chapter Forty-Six
Charlotte
I’m still tied to the chair. My arms ache as a slap comes across my cheek. The next lands across the other just as quickly.
Like Mark thinks if he beats me enough, he can somehow stamp the wickedness out of me.
I woke from the first round of his anger only moments ago, and already I’m struggling to stay conscious again. But what he doesn’t realize is that he was the one who made me this way. Who pushed me to the point of fury.
Enough fury I was willing to run into the devil’s waiting arms.
That thought pains me. The thought of Lucifer and what he now means to me. More than any of the blows against my broken and bruised body ever could. But Lucifer taught me more than how to endure pain ...
He made me crave it.
I crave that pain now more than ever. Not the one he gave me with his hands, but the one he created the moment he ruthlessly stole my heart right out of my chest.
His is a destructive love. A cruel thing.
But even after everything he did, I still want him. Need him.
I think that would have been true, even if the Righteous hadn’t struck first.
The power his love creates in me. The adrenaline. The way it makes me feel like I’m falling apart and coming together all at the same time.
It’s intoxicating.
And I think, not for the first time, that I might be a little addicted to him. Obsessed.
With his love. With the power it gives me. And with the twisted, wicked games we play.
I lied to him about my marital status for nearly as long as he lied to me. I’ve spent enough time tied to this chair, lost in the silence of my own thoughts and the blur of pain as Mark attempts to break my body, to realize that now. Even if my reason for lying was somewhat more ... benevolent.
But the devil is in the details, I suppose.
As Mark lands another blow, I laugh, this time coughing up blood.
I spit, spraying some of it onto his shoes and across the floor as it continues to run down my nose, pouring over my face and into my gasping lips until it coats my teeth, the metallic taste faded because my mouth is numb by now.
But still, I continue to laugh at him.
The chair topples sideways with his next blow, sending it and me to the floor.
“Stop laughing, you worthless cunt!” he roars.
I’ve learned that’s the worst thing you can do to a man like him.
Laugh at them. Humiliate them. Make them feel small.
Smaller than he already feels.
But I won’t give him the satisfaction of my fear. I can’t. I’m too delirious. Too busy choking on my own blood as the now-garbled words leave me. “Don’t you see?” I hiss, my voice nearly as snakelike as Lucifer’s.
From the power he gifted me by loving me, allowing me into his life.
Cruel as his world may be.
“Don’t you see? You can’t hurt me,” I whisper. I shake my head at him, smiling through bloodstained teeth. “I’m the queen of the damned,” I rasp, using the nickname they’ve given me in the papers. “And no matter what you do, he will always come for me.”
I only wish I had recognized that before.
How he’d destroy anything that stood in his path. Or mine.
All to prove his twisted version of love to me.