Page 34 of Savage Surrender

But I majorly fucked up.

Montgomery isn’t watching the room toast me. He’s watching my face, waiting.

Heat slips beneath my skin.

He put something in the champagne.

He’s forcing my heat early.

Panic clouds my vision. I crush it down before it reaches my face. He already got inside my body. I won’t give him the further satisfaction of watching me crumble.

A pressure low in my abdomen tightens. Not a cramp. A pull. Across the ballroom, Owen’s head jerks up, followed by Freddie’s, Tristan’s, then Weller’s. My scent is too strong, vanilla and burnt sugar pushing through flowers, food, and too many bodies.

Sweat gathers at my hairline under the burn of the lights and all these eyes. My pulse is going too hard and too fast, knocking to escape.

Get off this stage, get to them, get out, and then I can quietly lose my mind somewhere I’m not a spectacle.

Montgomery hasn’t stopped talking. He’s rambling about distribution and partnerships and interested parties reaching out to Barrett Pharmaceuticals, and every third word is the omega, which he says the way others say the Lord, like it’s a precious sacred thing in his eyes. Which is laughable considering.

My long-lost sisters stand off to the side of the stage in their beautiful gowns, watching him with something that looks a lot like admiration.

It makes me ill.

They don’t stand like hostages. Their faces are glossy, pretty, unmarred by life. One of them leans over to murmur a comment to the other. She laughs behind her hand, easy and private, the laugh of somebody who has known you for years. They lean into each other, and I can tell they’re close.

Something about it feels like I’m being punched in the gut. Did he let them be normal girls or did he hurt them in some way too? Are they going to cry when I kill him?

A screech tears through the speakers, and the whole room flinches hard as the screen behind us wakes up.

It comes into focus slowly, and the floor of the world drops out from under me.

I lean over and grab my knees. I can’t feel the scars through this fucking dress.

Breathe.

In for four, hold, out for four.

Because it’s the white room - the one he kept me in, and it’s me in it, up there on the screen.

The recording starts with Rebecca’s nose breaking beneath my forehead.

Cut. My teeth sink into Whitney’s arm. Cut. My heel drives Katie into the bedside table, and the wet crack blasts through the ballroom speakers.

“You killed Katie!” Liz screams.

Cut. Liz is facedown under me with my arm locked beneath her chin.

“Let her go!” Whitney cries.

Nothing before that. No rope burning my wrist. No scissors hacking through my hair. No knife pressed to my jaw. No collar turning me inside out.

My mouth fills with blood that isn’t there. My scalp sears, and the cold tile finds the back of my skull again.

Then my voice comes through the speakers.

“I hate you.”

The footage jumps to my thighs locked around Rebecca’s throat.