“You think I’m weak?”I ask quietly.
Something in me wants to stop, but I can’t, because stopping means going home with nothing. And going home with nothing means…
“If you’re going to pretend to be a man,” I say, cruelly, “you should wait until you at least have a man’s voice.”
The laughter fills me with a feeling much like freedom. Relief rolls from my shoulders. Because that laughter means, for once, I’ve done enough. I’ll be safe tonight.
I sagagainst the wall of the shower, shaking. The water runscold, but I don’t move. Something else is crystallizing now. Not a memory though; a realization.
The first night I entered Velvet… The masks, the scowls, the stares. The weird manner in which people greeted me.
The way everything unfolded so… precisely.
My breath stutters and I push away from the wall, wrapping a towel around myself with shaking hands as I stumble out of the bathroom.
How quickly Callum’s debt turned into me—how convenient. My stomach bottoms out. The whole thing was orchestrated.
Fiero Bellucci, the quiet boy who dared to ask if I was okay, is the man who now ownseverything.
This wasn’t chance. It wasn’t coincidence. It wasn’t some twisted fate bringing us back together. It washim.
This is how Fiero Bellucci got his revenge.
My mind races back through the last month.
That first night when he made me undress, he wanted to humiliate me. And he did, until he kissed me. The way he reacted now makes sense; he didn’t want to like it.
And he didn’t stop. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time but every encounter felt a little like punishment, like I wasn’t just repaying Callum’s debt, that somehow I was repaying my own. It didn’t make any sense.
Now, it does.
My knees almost give out as I stagger back into my bedroom.
He knew who I was, right from the beginning, and he waited until the time was exactly right.
I sink onto the edge of the bed, gripping the sheets.
He took everything I inflicted on him—the laughter, the humiliation, the mortification—and he twisted it into a pain all of my very own.
I willingly gave him my virginity. I let him fuck me with the handle of a blade.
I let myselffallfor him.
I press my hand to my mouth, trying to steady my breathing. This is the man who killed men that hurt me. He held me as I cried it out. The man whodidn’ttouch me when he could have.
He’s also the man who built this entire situation, brick by brick, just tobreakme.
I tip my head back, staring at the ceiling through blurred vision.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into the empty room. I don’t even know who I’m saying it to anymore.
I broke him; he broke me.
And neither of us have won.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Fiero
