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Chapter 32
POPPY
Flynn’s warm breath fans over my ear, “Half brother, different dad’s,” he shrugs loosely, the feel of his thick arm brushing against my chest, like it makes no difference, but he wants to clarify.
Something I could have assumed, I suppose, from their contrasting appearances, both brutally handsome in ways that should be illegal. But I would never have guessed the same deviant blood ran through each of their veins.
The shock is slow to spread, like a lazy toxin spearing infectious spores into my blood. I’m trembling, despite my stance being still as a statue. The flat of Flynn’s tongue laps upwards of my cheek, flicking the tip back and forth beneath my eye. Tasting me. My tears. My fears. The evidence of what he and his brothers, both blood and not, are doing to me.
Meticulously, one side and then the other, he cleans my face with his mouth, using his tongue, his lips, his teeth. Pain bolts through me as he nips at my newly swollen check, the impact with the floor making it bruise, I’m sure, and I squeeze my eyes shut tight. Keeping him out.
He doesn’t touch me with his hands, and it’s almost worse, the ways in which I wish he would. If only for the pretty lie.Comfort in a time of panic. Something that is usual for him, the way in which he soothes me, makes me feel at ease, even though, I know, there’s darkness hidden in those pools of blue, I still felt safe.
Now, everything is different.
My heart thuds erratically loud as he steps back, making a slow show of licking his pale pink lips, his cupid’s bow overly defined, pretty, almost too delicate for his face.
“You’re confused,” he whispers over my mouth, breath blowing across my lips. “It’s okay to cry.”
I swallow thickly, eyelids loosening from their tight squeeze. I sway in the cold breeze, thinking about doing just that, but I don’t. Instead, I think about Flynn’s hands running all over my naked body, it can’t be more than an hour or so ago since he had me splayed out on the desk in his office, his face between my thighs, tongue in my cunt.
Please, don’t let me go, Flynn. Don’t you hurt me too.
But then I think of all the sessions we’ve had, the way that sometimes, things just aren’t as they seem. How the things he says are worded to coerce me, to tempt me, to pry information from the darkest recesses of my brain and twist them like a knife in my gut.
I came here trying to forget about everything that happened, but Flynn just wouldn’t let me have that. I told him what I did, where they locked me away.
I think of Mum, feeling the guilt, as though it were my fault. Never being reassured it wasn’t.
Swallowing hard, throat jumping as I do, I open my eyes, locking them onto Flynn’s, “Just do whatever it is you’re going to do.”
Without another word, Flynn takes my shoulders in his hands, spinning me around, his waft of heat hitting my spinelike I’m thrown into the fire. And he’s walking me forward in the night.
In my mind, I go back to just this morning.
I reach my long, thin fingers towards a little bump of bright green, grainy powder. Bonnie crushed pills,Venom, she says, non-addictive, supposedly. And I retract my hand as she says it, unsure if I want to consume substances not designed to kill me. Emma frowns, her beautiful dark skin creasing just between her perfectly sculpted brows as she dips a spit-slicked finger into the luminous green sand, bringing it to her lips.
Pressing her fingertip to her tongue with a raised brow, then a dipped brow, a wince, and then, “Shit, that’s dry.”
She coughs, grimacing, before a beautiful smile curls her plump, deep rose lips, a laugh leaving her like an accident, she couldn’t stop it and I wonder how any drug could work that quickly.
Then another thought crashes through my skull, maybe she’s just happy.
I wonder if I ever could be.
The space is open, I can feel it, without having to look, but I do, Iamlooking at the huge clearing as we push through the last of the dense forest. Bare trees that Flynn steered me through with ease, his grip on my bound hands, keeping me from falling face first onto the ground again.
I stumble a little, nerves making my legs jelly, five men around me who want to play with me in the dark.
That’s the worst part of it all.
The dark.
But the boys all have torches, other than Flynn, and I cling onto the long beams of light like a lifeline, trying not to thinkof how close the sky feels, hanging low with the forecasted rainstorm.
Flynn knocks me to my knees, pain bolting through my femurs as I hit the uneven ground, thick wooden slats and frozen earth digging into my bones. But I bite my tongue, holding the feelings inside, locking the pain behind my teeth.
Lynx steps around me, grabbing my chin with brute force, yanking my face up, his cold skin against my own, the harsh vice grip of his hand cupping my chin, his thumb and fingers digging into my skin. He towers over me, those red-brown eyes almost black in the darkness, he scowls down at me, upper lip curled in disgust.
