Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
GEMMA
Violent sobs had left me, but tears still poured. I couldn’t stop them. It was like something had burst in my soul, leaking out of my eyes. Grim carried me back to his room. The Horsemen froze when they saw me, an audible silence corrupting their previous conversation.
The tears wouldn’t stop coming. Hot on my cheeks. My chest clawing with something I couldn’t describe. Inside the room, Grim set me on the bed. I thought he’d leave, shut the door, and probably question his life choices.
Instead, he sat down next to me, pulling me into his lap.
He wrapped his arms around me, pressing my head to his chest. I don’t know how long he sat with me like that, silent, letting me soak his soft shirt with my tears. He dragged his knuckles along my neck, perfectly content.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I whispered, voice muffled by the soft fabric of his shirt.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said simply. “You feel.”
I lifted my head, skin between my brows tugging as I processed what he said.
He lifted up my chin, swiping away my tears, then bringing the taste of them to his lips. “You see what no one else does. You feel what no one else does. The world wants to erase that. Your world, especially.”
My shoulders sagged.
Yeah. That’s it.
Emotions were always a shameful thing in my home. Having zero control of them? Unthinkable. As a little girl I was called too sensitive, too much. I don’t remember the exact moment I started hiding.
I peered at Grim.
I didn’t understand him. How he could keep secrets from me. How he could lie and rearrange my life, while also being everything I needed.
“Don’t you want someone, you know, not broken?” I asked.
Softness creased the corners of his eyes, but not with pity. He stared at me a long time—too long, so I felt like squirming. Then he laughed. Laughing? I pushed at his chest to get away, but he gripped my hands.
“You think I’m doing you a favor? I’m not.
I’m selfish.” I stopped struggling, settling back into him.
There was that word again. Selfish. Grim’s selfish wasn’t like my selfish.
“I’m so fucking selfish I had a thousand opportunities to let you go, and I didn’t.
I won’t.” With both hands he gripped my face, possessive and bruising, eyes searing. “I don’t feel. Or, I didn’t…until you.”
I turned away, unable to compute the sincerity in his eyes. “What if I’m always like this?”
“Good.” He dragged my gaze back to his. “When it gets too much, don’t hide. Let me help you forget. If I can’t, you hurt me.”
Hurt me.
The first time we met flashed into me. The strange, aloof boy who’d taken my nails against his neck. Who’d given me a brief taste of peace.
As if remembering the same thing, he placed my hand to his neck. “You hurt me as much as you need.”
“I can’t—”
“You’d be doing me a favor,” he said with a growl that slid into my bones.
“Despite what our history may suggest,” I said, “I don’t actually want to hurt you.”
“Don’t be greedy, Gemma.” He pressed my nails into his skin. “What are you feeling? I want to feel it too. Put it inside me.”
Muscles coiled in his neck, his jaw working with restraint. His eyes throbbed, savage and ravenous.
And because of that I scythed.
He let out a jagged groan as the skin broke. After a tantalizingly long minute, he inhaled, rough and broken, lids hooded, jaw clenched. “Good girl.”
Good disappeared into something rocky, and I felt the praise abrade my blood.
He pulled me tighter onto his lap and I felt him, hard iron between my thighs. Like everything else about us, I know this is fucked. I know. I should probably be in therapy. But the thing was, I’d done that. All it ever did was make me feel even more broken.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.” It wasn’t a request, but a demand.
“I’m…I’m mad.”
“More,” he demanded instantly.
“I hate how I have to do mental contortions, rip apart pieces of me to be accepted. I want to scream at the world, strangle it until they understand the problem isn’t me, it’s them.”
I dug into his neck, bright pebbles of blood sprouting beneath my nails. At the increased pressure, his cock jolted against mine.
His jaw was taut, eyes rapt.
Hungry.
Doing this, wanting him while pain still scratched my insides, was doing something to me. His cock on my ass, his words on my lips, were a whip on my soul, grazing teeth along the flesh of my heart.
It was like…emotional BDSM.
“You would be distressed, too, bitch,” I yelled.
I didn’t know who I was talking to.
I didn’t know where this anger came from.
It was definitely not for Grim, but his eyes gleamed, urging me on.
“You would be so fucking distressed.” I dragged my nails down his neck, four jagged red lines following. “If everyone wanted to pollute the very essence of you just so you would smell like them.”
One arm slid around my waist, pulling me tight against him.
“But instead I have to learn how to live with you.”
“No, you don’t.” With his free hand, he lifted my chin. “You’re a queen, Gemma.”
The earnestness in the black depths of his eyes was disarming. Queen. I’d heard some version of that my entire life. But it was never like this. A power behind it, a reverence.
When Grim said it, I felt it.
More than that, I felt like it belonged to me.
He pressed a deep, hungry kiss to my lips. “The world bends to you.”
Grim lifted me off him, onto the bed. He got to his knees, fingers coming to the hem of my skirt. There was hunger in his eyes, but his touch was gentle and unpressured. He dragged the skirt off my body, then gently lifted my shirt over my head.
He pushed me back into bed, pulling the blankets up.
It twisted me up. This brutal criminal was treating me like I was made of glass. He sat next to me, back against the headboard, and pulled me to his side.
“Go to sleep, Rich Girl,” he said, tracing his fingertips through my hair.
I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, the sky twinkled early-morning iron. I felt leaden, limbs heavy, eyes swollen. The kind of heaviness that came with too much emotion and too little sleep.
Grim was no longer in bed. I sat against the headboard, pulling the silky black sheets with me.
Ready to go home, Rich Girl?
I thought back to Grim’s words. Home. In a perfect world I would stay here. This would be my home.
But everything was so messy.
As long as I was a Crowne, I couldn’t just disappear.
Antsy, I hopped out of bed, throwing on one of Grim’s black shirts. It came just to my thighs. The house was quiet in the morning, the creak of floorboards beneath my soles the only sound.
“Cutting it real close to the deadline.”
I paused at the top of the stairs. That voice sounded familiar. I peeked around the corner and froze.
It was Prince HSOG.
I quickly darted back before anyone saw me.
“I already told you no. I showed up at the Underworld. I gave you what you wanted.”
The prince laughed. “As long as you have that tattoo, you jump when I say jump. Unless you want something to happen to her—”
A large thud sounded, like a body had been slammed against the wall.
Prince HSOG laughed. “Is that any way to treat your father?”
Father?
The prince was Grim’s father?
“If anything happens to her, I’ll end you.”
“You can end this anytime, Santos. Finish her, or keep your pet and come join me, finally.” The sound of shuffling followed, like bodies moving and clothes being straightened. “You have until the fifteenth.”
The door opened with a creak, then slammed shut.
Finish her or keep your pet.
I couldn’t move. My heart hammered, frozen in place. Even when footfalls sounded on the stairs, I was stuck. The floor had become tar, and I was sinking into it.
Grim stopped short on the top step, looking like a deer in headlights.
“Father?” I said. “He’s your father?”