Chapter Thirty-Six #3
I wait until practice is over and we're back at the Sigma Delta Chi house and everyone's gone to bed to approach our star quarterback and captain, Tyler Prescott, knocking on his bedroom door.
We've grown closer this year since he’s taken me under his wing, and I was nominated as Co-captain for the Yellow Jackets. “Hey, Tyler, can I talk to you?”
His door opens and I’m instantly met with bright blue eyes like clear ocean waters and a singular blonde brow lifts along with a corner of his lips. “Yeah?”
“It’s about… your contract with my stepsister.”
He blows out a breath, steps back and motions for me to step into his room, the master suite since he has seniority and as captain.
Closing the door behind him he steps forward until he’s in front of his desk chair, sits then swivels to face me.
“Trust me, this is the last thing I wanted but my dad is dead set on Raven. I don’t even think it’s about the money. He just… wants her.”
My guts churn and a wave of nausea hits me. “Can’t you do something?”
“I tried.” He waves it off like he’s just accepted it.
“Tyler, please. She’s… she doesn’t belong in this world she’ll never be happy. She’s gonna do big things with her music.”
“Look, Axel, it wasn’t my choice,” he stands, making his way to me, stepping so close we're toe-to-toe. “If I could have a different choice… it would be you.”
I feel my eyes widen in surprise. “What?”
“Are you really that blind?” he laughs but it’s not funny, the smile on his face doesn’t reach his eyes and there’s not enough air in the room. He presses his firm lips to mine and my brain short circuits.
I pull away to break the kiss but all I feel is more conflicted than ever.
“Axel…” Why does the crack in his voice send chills up my spine and down my forearms and back up?
“Fix this? Please?” I plea. A rumbling noise at the base of his chest makes me want to tremble but I don’t back down.
“What is your fixation with her? Huh? Is this some kind of Cruel Intentions shit? You want to fuck your sister? Why can’t I have you both? Keep you, inseminate her- you could have us both.”
But I don’t want him. “You would share me? Her?”
He looks alarmed but then doesn’t. “Any marriage I would enter would be a lavender marriage, Axel. In this life I can’t have you the way I want.
And you probably don’t want me the way I want you, either.
But if you’re begging for her because you want her, let me marry her.
You can have her, and I’ll have her give me an heir to continue the legacy when the time is right. ”
I shake my head. “What about when it’s time for her to give me an heir? It’ll have your last name.”
“Would that be so bad? ”
Yes. Because I want our children to be just that – ours .
“Fix this and you can have me.”
My life for hers.
________
It takes him three weeks before he calls me from downstairs. I walk into what looks like an intervention. Simon, Thadd, his clingy on-again, off-again girlfriend nobody in this house can stand, Ashleigh, and Jacob.
“We've come up with the perfect plan. We need you as a witness.”
My jaw drops. “You’re going to kill her?”
“The contract is iron-clad.”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t want her dead.”
Tyler stands up from the red velvet cushioned chair and walks toward me. “I don’t want this marriage. It’ll happen with or without you. You planted the seed in my brain; it’s a done deal. Jacob will be the lookout, Thadd, Ash, Simon and I will do it all. We just need you to bear witness and sign.”
I feel sick.
“This way, you don’t have to lay a finger on anyone and still be initiated. You still haven’t done yours nor have any of us. We need to do it while there’s still time.”
I'm going to vomit. Which is why I don’t understand why I nod along and say, “ fine .”
________
I stand watch while they… I look away as she tries to scream when they break her leg, swallowing my bile down, tears in my eyes.
But it’s better this way. This isn’t the life she wants.
She’ll be trapped with nowhere to go. Her face is too recognizable.
I’d know her in complete darkness – I do know her in complete darkness .
They close the locker with her inside and I can still hear muffled, ragged breathing and it’s when we're out and past the gardens I double over and spew everything I’ve ever eaten.
________
“Axel, Corazón! Where’s Raven?”
My blood rushes to my ears. “Oh, she said she'd meet us tomorrow before her birthday party,” I answer Sofia who smiles unknowingly and resumes looking at sketches of her designs for her fashion line.
To be so ignorant must be such bliss.
Across the desk my father’s gaze latches onto mine but I go upstairs to my bedroom.
________
When Raven doesn’t show up the next day or to her birthday or Sunday morning, without us knowing, Sofia calls the police while we're on our way to RMU to be initiated. Because who survives that much blood loss?
Had one of the Initiates not forgotten to put his phone on silent, we never would have known she had survived.
It was kismet.
________
Raven being thrown into an asylum was not on my bingo card and every day I’m sicker than the last. I let Tyler kiss me. I let him do whatever he wants. I can’t feel it anyway and he remains oblivious.
_______ _
It's when I have an individual meeting with the Elders about my future… about having to re-do my initiation… that it all comes into focus.
“While we do our best to keep up with the times and tie them in with our traditions…
my grandson's proclivities and tastes are still not within the marginal bounds of our society nor the adjacent chapters. An heir must be produced,” Stephen's father says.
“Due to the circumstances, should the girl ever speak-"
“Stephen and I are making sure she doesn’t,” John intersects. “His half-breed will be taking vital steps in making sure she doesn’t say a word.”
“Be that as it may, your son still owes blood and arrangements for him are called off. There will be no merging of the families. Tyler doesn’t want her in her state and she’s useless to Stephen behind barred windows and steel doors.”
“The contract has been signed!”
“The contract is null and void, John. No heir is capable of being produced. She’s unable to sign a marriage certification in her constant state of drug-induced interventions and therapies if what I’m told is correct. It’s in the fine print.”
If my blood wasn’t boiling I’d laugh at that last bit.
Oh how the tables have turned, John.
“Tyler is now signed off to marry a daughter from the Bones chapter. Your family is no longer needed and your boy… will now have to prove himself for the time being. New blood and five years of Watcher affairs and operations.”
Five years.
It’s a prison sentence.
What did Tyler get?
A fucking duchess.
________
The night of the annual homecoming ball, I take a Viagra.
It may be the dumbest or smartest thing I’ve ever done.
I set up a camera in the coat closet and when we have a moment alone, I pay the attendant to go elsewhere.
It’s not perfect. It’ll never be enough to avenge her or redeem myself, but I keep my mask on the entire time I have Tyler bent over, fucking his tight ass making him moan like a bitch in heat.
I almost laugh when he makes a mess on the floor of the coat room, and I fuck him till his asshole is sore and red.
I take the condom off and make sure to cum all over his face where the camera can see where he licks and sucks on my balls. He thinks he’s adorable like this, but all I can see as I douse his face is a retribution.
I kindly clean him up as if I care about him and have him leave first so I can take the camera.
I edit.
Then I post.
Everywhere.
Then… I’m ghost.
________
I sign up for sessions with Dr. Archer as part of my Watcher “duties,” but it helps a lot. For four fucking years. I can almost taste freedom.
But then Raven re-enrolls at RMU.
Catching Damon in her room made me furious, but I allowed it. Then it was Jonas and goddamn. I was almost impressed. But the envy I felt was complete and utter torture.
Finding her with a broken heart makes me murderous then giving her a bath… it takes everything in me not to take what I want. To take her away. But there’s another place I can take her to.
I treasure our time together at her lake house, feeling her slip into bed with me one last time, holding her close, breathing her in. My slice of heaven.
But then it all goes downhill from there.
I drop out of Hartford to keep a closer eye on her and thank God I did.
I jerk off, watching as Chase licks her pussy silly, becoming a green-eyed monster in the flesh but then…
a splash in the water makes me jerk off harder when I realize what she’s doing and come so hard I’m breathless when’s he gets back on the dock, naked, and she pushes Chase's body away with her toe.
I watch everything, see everything according to the cameras I placed about the lake house, fisting my cock so much it’s raw. I tell Stephen only what he wants to know.
No, she isn’t talking.
No, it can’t be her behind these murders because when I see her signing, when she’s talking to me… I’ll do whatever it takes to get her back.
I only have less than a year in my sentence.
It’s when Riordan burns her house down and she moves in with Maverick that I see red, sneaking in is difficult but soon I know the entire layout to his house.
When Arlo asks for the best way to break in, I already know the answer and how to get into his backyard. But I tell him to go when I know Mav will be home. I already know the outcome to that scenario.
And I was right.
One less Prescott, Cookie…
________
I look at her, standing before me, my father’s blood slowly dripping from the dagger in her hand, as I tell her about Riordan and then having to kidnap her for Stephen only to end up watching him drug her. I couldn’t stay to watch it. Duties or not.
“Don’t you see, Ray? I made sure you knew how to get to the restricted section. I made sure you found the ledger.” It was the last thing I did before I left RMU campus after dropping her off that first day. “I did what I could to help you from afar.”
“You… you killed me.” She rasps but there’s so much emotion and turmoil in her eyes that I can’t stand it.
Tears spring to my eyes. “No! I didn’t touch you! I would never hurt you. I love you!”
“You… killed me. I… d-died.”
My brows shoot up .
“For one minute and sss-seventeen seconds I was dead.” The word lingers in the air but all I can hear is the blood rushing to my ears.
“I didn’t want that to happen, Cookie. I swear. I-I didn’t see any other way out of this for you. You wouldn’t have been happy. If not one then it would have been the other.”
“You did this… t-to me! You mmm-made me like this.” The venom in her voice kills me. She’s never used that tone with me. Not even when she would get in trouble for getting me sick, or me tattling on her when she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.
My knees buckle at her accusations, my heart thumping so loudly in my ears but I can’t look away from her.
Not then. Not now. “Don’t say that, Ray.
Don’t say that! I love you! I found the only way out of this I could!
They would’ve kept you a bird in a gilded cage with nowhere to go.
Nowhere to fly! You would’ve dwindled and died!
Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that I…
I love you enough to kill you? I love you enough to set your soul free! ” I sob, tears streaking down my face.
“I loved you.” A tear falls from the lid of her left eye, clearing a path through the blood caked on her cheek but I don’t care that it belongs to my father.
With shaky breath and a war cry, she’s on me.
“I loved you!” She screams as we go down and the knife is at my throat and her salty, bloody tears drop onto my face, warm and decadent.
Like her love.
“I still love you.” I sob. “Every moment of every day of the last fourteen years I have loved you. Kill me. I won’t stop. You were always meant to be mine, Ray. Can’t you see it?”
Honey eyes lock on mine, full of fury and exasperation. I’m as wrecked for her now as I was when we met. “You… betrayed me,” she breathes against my lips. She trembles in my arms, the weight of it all crashing down around me.
“No I didn’t!” But I did.
Not once.
Not even twice.
I betrayed her every time I had a chance to tell her to run away. To create another life. A new life. That I would find her wherever she went and join her later when we were safe.
I betrayed her every time I chose to preserve myself.
Three different pairs of footsteps fill the room. I should’ve known she wouldn’t come alone.
“Little Bird,” Damon says from the corner of the threshold. “Let us take care of this.”
She sobs in my embrace, a string of saliva connecting from one lip to the other, they curl back, and she lets out one last sob, her face going to the crook of my neck. “I w-would have… run away with you. Gone… anywhere … with you. That was always… my dream. Me and you… And you… t-took it away.”
My eyes widen as my mind replays every single fucked up deed I’ve done for the past five years leading from to this moment to the day we met like a fucked backwards reel, and I scream when Maverick hauls her to him, my vision blurred from tears and Damon and Jonas lift me from where I was laying with her perfect weight on me.
“No! No wait! Please! I can share her! I just want her happy! I’ll share her! ” I try to reason.
“Raven!”
But Jonas and Damon crowd me and she’s out of my line of sight.
There’s no goodbye.
________
I’m still alive but barely breathing as the wheels of whatever vehicle we’re in roll beneath me. I’m in the trunk, too weak to scream for help. We come to a lurching stop and then three doors open and slam shut. It’s freezing, but the cold wind feels good on my open wounds.
I’m too tired, to hurt to even groan when they lift me.
“Here?” One of them asks.
“Yeah. This soil is still fresh.” That’s Jonas.
“It'll be easier to dig up and just bury him there. Nobody will look in a cemetery.” Maverick replies. He would know wouldn’t he?
It takes a few hours for them to finish digging and I’m shivering, hypothermia settling in by the time I’m dropped into a grave landing hard on a casket and soon, soil is being thrown over me.
Fitting, isn’t it? That I’m being buried alive.
Almost as cruel as leaving someone in a locker to die…
Over time, the moist dirt is… nice… warm. A blanket shielding me from the bitter cold. I’m sure the last of the night sky is turning pink as I take my last breath full of soil.
I was born with weak lungs, after all.