Chapter Sixteen
Asher
Idon't move. I can't. For a full minute after she says it, I just stand there, as if the words might disappear if I don't breathe. But they hang between us anyway, impossible to ignore.
I love you, you impossible bastard. I never stopped.
She means it. She fucking means it. She doesn't look away. She just stands there, offering me the last scrap of her heart like it's her most prized possession.
I see the hope in her eyes. The insane, stupid, reckless hope that maybe—after everything—I might say it back.
If I thought I could ever be worthy of her, I wouldn't even hesitate.
But I'm not that man. I am what I am, and what I am doesn't deserve a single ounce of the love she just gave me. I never have.
I'm the one who nearly killed her five years ago.
The one who put her in that hospital bed yesterday, when she stepped in front of a car just to escape the truth of what I am.
I'm the one who left fingerprints around her throat, and the one who broke her, over and over, until there was nothing left of her but raw, ragged edges and festering wounds.
I don't even know how to receive love, let alone return it. So I do the only thing I've ever been good at, the only thing I understand: I destroy.
"You're wrong," I say, my voice a whisper. "You don't love me, Brielle."
She flinches like I hit her, but she stands her ground. "I'm not. I love you."
I want to run. I want to slam my own head through the goddamn wall, just to stop myself from saying what has to come next. But my mouth works anyway, the words clicking into place like a prison lock.
"You think this is love?" I say, louder now. "You think any of this is real?"
"It is," she says defiantly, her head held high. "You're just too broken to let yourself admit that you feel the same way. Well, guess what? I don't care. I love you anyway."
I force a bitter laugh. "You should have learned by now—I can't be fixed. I'm not the fucking hero in your story, princess. I'm the monster who buys you and ruins you, just because he can."
She stands there, shaking, her hands curled into fists at her sides. "I never wanted to fix you," she says. "I just wanted you."
"You never had me, not really. You were just something to own. A distraction." My throat is so tight, I nearly choke on the lies as they spill out. "I didn't pay you to love me. I paid you to obey. I wanted your body, not your heart."
She blinks, stunned by the cold cruelty I'm pouring into her.
Hope bleeds from her eyes, leaving a void, and I want to fucking scream the world down around us.
Maybe then I'll be able to forget the way she's looking at me right now.
Maybe then I'll be able to take back every fucked-up, awful thing I ever did to her.
But I don't scream, and I don't take it back.
I have to finish it. If I don't, I'll pull her into my arms and beg for forgiveness.
I'll fuck her on the floor and whisper the truth in her ear.
And I'll destroy her from the inside out, piece by piece, until there's nothing left of her at all.
There won't be anything left of me then, either.
When she dies, I do. It's my only goddamn comfort in the world…the fact that I don't have to survive losing her.
I step forward, close enough to see the pulse pounding at the base of her throat.
"You want something real?" I ask, the words soft and savage at the same time. "Then get on your knees. Crawl to me. That's real, Brielle. The way you let me fuck and break you is the only real thing between us. It's the only real thing that's ever been between us."
Her jaw locks, her nostrils flare, but she doesn't move. Maybe she thinks I'll back down, that this is just another round of the same old game. But I don't blink. I don't even breathe.
"That isn't what you really want," she finally says.
"If you believe that, then there's no saving you," I snap, each syllable a nail in my coffin.
"You think I told you I didn't love you the night of the accident for the hell of it?
You're smarter than that, Brielle. I said it because it was the truth.
It's still true. You really should have listened to Andrews when he tried to warn you. Monsters don't love. We own. We break."
She flinches, curling in on herself slightly, and I see the doubt in her eyes, the same doubt I saw the night of the accident. She believes me, just like she did back then.
"You don't mean that," she whispers, her voice shaking.
"Yeah, I do. All I ever wanted from you was you on your knees, so do it," I growl. "Earn your fucking money. Crawl to me."
She swallows. Her chin trembles. But after a second—just one—she drops. First to her knees, and then to her palms, curled in on herself like she knows the end is coming, but she isn't willing to run from it anymore.
She starts crawling, every move a fucking dagger in my heart. Her head is bowed, her hair a black curtain around her face, but I see the way her whole body shakes. I see the wetness already sliding down her cheeks, the stains on the floor where her tears land.
With every inch she closes between us, I die a little more. She doesn't belong on her knees. She never has.
When she's within arm's reach, I stare at her, trying to memorize the exact moment when she gives up hope for good. Her mascara leaves tracks down her face. Her mouth is twisted, torn between a snarl and a sob.
She's never been so beautiful, and I've never hated myself more.
I want to say something, anything, to soften the blow. I want to take her hands, haul her up, and kiss her until she remembers why she loved me in the first place.
But if I do, I'll kill us both. She deserves someone who can give her soft and sweet and everything I'll never be, someone who doesn't have her blood on his hands.
Someone who hasn't spent years trying to break her just so he could cling to the splintered fragments and say any part of her belonged to him.
So I just stand there, watching her crawl, letting her hate me the way I've always deserved.
When she finally stops at my feet, she kneels, her hands in her lap. She doesn't look up. Her shoulders heave, silent and small.
I want to pull her into my arms, but I know if I do, I'll never let her go.
I force myself to speak, each word like acid poured directly into my veins. "That's better," I say. "Now you're where you belong."
She doesn't answer. She just keeps her head down, as if she's praying for this to end.
I stare at her for a long time, long enough to see her hands unclench, long enough to see the last bit of light leave her eyes.
It hurts in a way death never could.
"Finish it," she whispers, her voice a scrap of sound.
I don't move. I can't.
"I said finish it, Asher," she says, still not looking at me even as she gives me permission to destroy and damn us both. "You don't get to do it halfway, not this time. Finish it."
But I still don't move. I fucking can't.
"Finish it!" she screams, looking at me for the first time since she started crawling, her eyes wild with something I can't name, some level of devastation that threatens to tear the skin from my bones.
"Fucking finish it right now. If you want to be the monster, then be him. Right now. You owe me that much."
I sink my hand into her hair, hauling her to her feet.
She doesn't resist, not even when I push her up against the wall.
Her palms splay against it, bracing herself as I crowd in, pressing my chest to her back and my cock to the curve of her ass.
I breathe her in, a single, shuddering drag of orange blossoms and sweat.
She doesn't look at me. She doesn't say a word. Her silence is worse than any slap, any insult. I want her to scream. To fight me. To hurt me the way I'm hurting her.
That's how this has always worked between us. I hurt her, and she retaliates. We pick at wounds and go for the throat and never fucking back down. No one really wins, and no one really ever loses, either. We just play the same song, over and over.
She's not playing now, and I fucking hate it. I deserve every hit, every insult, every fucking ounce of rage. And she won't give them to me. She isn't giving me a goddamn thing except permission to break us both, one final time.
I palm her hip and yank up her skirt, desperate to make her feel something, to make her fight, to claw my way into her soul one last time.
She's not wearing panties because I never let her.
It's been weeks since I last let her. Her skin is cold.
Goosebumps chase across her thighs as I shove her legs apart until she's spread wide against the glass wall.
I don't bother unzipping. I just free my cock and line it up, pushing inside in one brutal thrust.
She gasps, not from pleasure, not from pain, but from some place in between. A place only I know how to find.
I fuck her hard, using her body the way a drowning man uses a life raft—not for rescue, but for the illusion of survival. My hands dig into her waist, leaving more bruises. My chest is pressed so tight to her back she can't breathe unless I let her.
With every thrust, I try to obliterate what's left of her. What's left of me. I try to make her fight me, to realize that she'll always deserve better than this. I finish destroying the last threads between us, exactly like she demanded.
She doesn't fight. She barely even breathes.
She whimpers once, the sound so small I nearly miss it.
I reach up and grab her throat, squeezing until I feel her pulse shudder beneath my palm the way it does when I control her breathing—when I know that I alone have the power to keep her breathing.
Not a goddamn car accident or a punctured lung, but me.
Her face is pressed to the wall, her hair stuck to her lips with tears she doesn't bother wiping away. I want to see her eyes, want to see if there's anything left in them, so I turn her head and look.