4. Sawyer
SAWYER
There are seventeen cracks in the wall of the training house bedroom, one longer than the rest. It carves a path to the windowsill, cream paint peeling around it. Four feet beyond in one corner of the ceiling, four dead flies lie stranded in a spider's web, bellies up.
I have tapped my teeth together a total of twelve thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven times.
Still, Luna has not arrived.
My jaw aches from the movement, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I’ve already tried.
“Fuck,” I hiss with a slap to the mattress. I spring from the bed and walk each floorboard for a fifth time—all twenty-nine of them, five that creak. One step in front of the other, like practice for a sobriety test.
She’s not coming.
Angel.
Angel.
Angel.
My shoe catches on a warped board as my heart thumps hard, a punch to the temple. I stumble and gasp as my muscles seize—wildly dramatic, but it pauses my tapping teeth. I clench my jaw before it can start again. No more.
She’s not coming, but she isn’t dead. Angel would never make it so easy; he’d want her to suffer. He’d want me to suffer.
It’s all right.
For now, it’s all right.
With a slow breath, I force myself back to the bed and slump against the headboard. It thumps ever so softly as my knee kicks to a familiar rhythm. It seems random until I remember the last time I heard the thump of this headboard.
I wait.
And I wait.
Until the muted gray of dawn filters through the dirty glass window, and the front door slams. Slams, not shuts.
I jump to my feet and stare at the door like a fucking dog waiting for its master, an image so repulsive, I nearly sit back down.
But I don’t.
I listen for Luna’s footsteps, or rather, the lack of. A faint pitter patter as opposed to heavy stomps.
A board on the staircase creaks. Then another.
When Luna opens the door, my lungs seem to scream with a held breath. I release it but don’t take another until I’ve scanned for injuries, extra injuries.
Nothing. She’s fine.
“Hi.” Way too high-pitched. I swallow and try again. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
She stares at me like I just pissed on her houseplant. Nothing leaves her lips, but the severity carved into each facial divot and angle of bone says all.
She knows.
“I can expl—”
My eyes follow her hands as they find the button on her black pants. It pops free with a brutal yank, and a sharp zip follows.
“Lie down on the bed.”
Her eyes never leave mine as she curls her fingers inside her waistband and peels her pants over her hips. She shimmies them down her legs with slow but rigid movement, each jut of her hips like a strike I’m surprised I don’t feel.
“Did you hear me, slave?”
I drag my eyes back to her face just as she kicks the pants aside. All I can do is blink.
She doesn’t know … ?
That’s even worse. Now I have to warn her.
“I gave you a command.”
Soon.
“Slave.”
Her voice is the crack of a whip—not sexy; not playful. Certainly not horny.
But she’s been like this before, hasn’t she? Again at this house, choking me until I passed out, assaulting me until I begged for mercy. She was horny then.
My cock stirs, so abrupt and so bizarre that I have to look down at the bulge in my pants just to believe it’s real.
Something is wrong with me.
I hold my hands up; backpedal toward the bed. “Yes, Your Grace.”
The chorus of rickety creaks the mattress makes as my weight settles is like music Luna uses for the final part of her strip tease.
Her sweater on the floor—creak.
Rose-pink nipples revealed with the snap of her bra—squeak.
Bruise-covered ribs exposed with the unraveling of a bandage—groan, as I sit up and plant my feet on the floor. The look in her eyes is like a weight that lays me back down, a silent command I’m hopeless to defy.
Hopeless?
My cock grows as she saunters toward me with a tigress sway and a devilish sneer, out for blood. I should tell her to stop, to talk to me, but for the first time since seeing Angel, my mind clears. In the three seconds it takes for her to straddle my waist, I’m myself again.
This is a part I know how to play.
The heat of her pussy rests on my waist, half-hugging me through my clothes.
I jerk my shirt from beneath her thighs to feel her skin-to-skin and almost regret it.
We haven’t played enough to be as slick as she feels, which means once again I’m subjecting myself to Thorne’s cum.
I might feign jealousy if it wasn’t for the triangle of white hair atop her Snow-White skin flattening as she grinds against me—sexy, so sexy I nearly forget I once thought it strange.
My hands find her thighs, but as soon as they climb, I’m stopped by a hard crack against my cheek.
“Don’t touch me, slave.” Her raised voice cuts through shock, the closest thing to a yell that Luna has.
“Fuck, Luna.” I rub the sting from my cheek and hardly suppress a glare. “Not so hard.”
“Place your palms on the headboard and do not move them.”
I hesitate, if only for a moment. Something isn’t right with her face. It’s too confident, too sure of itself to belong to the sexually insecure Luna I know, especially after hitting me. She looks like she wants to punish me. She looks, for once, like a sociopathic Head Keeper of a deadly cult.
I plant my palms against the headboard.
Good, slave, I wait for her to say. But she misses her cue and instead glides her fingers down my eyelids to close them.
Is that a tremble?
My eyes stay closed, but I feel on high alert as Luna lays herself on top of me. Soft, timid lips press against my jaw.
There she is.
She follows the slope of my neck to the hollow of my throat, her nails scraping as she tugs my collar down. One of her hands presses my chin up while the other grips my cock through my pants.
The groan that eases from my chest changes octave as she squeezes too hard, but the creaking bed swallows the sound as I shift my hips.
I don’t open my eyes or move my hands—not until I feel movement at my jaw. I didn’t imagine the tremble.
Desire?
My eyelids flutter open just as her kisses grow more desperate. She nips along my collar bone while seeking the button on my pants, but the tremble shifts to a shake and delays the effort.
Not desire.
“Luna.”
Her breaths come in pants against my neck while her hand finds my cock with a grip akin to clutching a bar of soap. In a public shower.
“Hey…” I cup the back of her neck; give a squeeze when she doesn’t respond. “Luna.”
She stiffens. “I said don’t touch me.”
“Then look at me. Pause a second.”
She releases her grip and works her hand from my pants. A curtain of white hair tickles my neck as she continues to hide. When her head finally raises, her eyes are just as cold as before. “What?” she snaps. “I thought you liked this.”
Through a squint, I search for emotion, some semblance of the timid girl kissing my neck. I may as well have imagined her. “What’s wrong?”
She just stares.
“Is it Thorne?”
“No,” she deadpans.
“Is it your father?”
“No.”
“Is it… Mr. Sanchez, or whatever his name was? Did he say something to you?”
My eyes draw to the divot above her sternum as it dips, then rises. A swallow I’m not sure how to interpret. If it was Angel that bothered her, she’d be angry.
This is something else.
“No, Sawyer… Nothing is wrong. Nothing has happened.” Her shoulders lift with a breath. “This is me. Do you want it or not?”
Confident words, told by a girl with tight skin high up on her cheekbone, the slight wrinkle of a brow. Hands balled into fists to fight a tremble that gives her away so thoroughly, I don’t understand why she’s still acting.
She doesn’t want to tell me. Fine. Maybe I don’t want to know.
“I always want you,” I say. I think I mean it.
The wrinkle in her brow fades to a soft white line, then disappears altogether. “Good.” She climbs off the bed and brushes imaginary dust from her stomach. When her chin lifts, I shudder at the chill in her gaze.
“Then get up… We’re going to the training room.”