Page 731 of Lessons in Cruelty

For a moment, I just stare at her.

No one has struck me like that since…since Evelyn.

“Don’t you dare blame me for your cruelty.” Haven’s voice is shaking with righteous fury. “Are you too blind to realize that’s all you’re fucking capable of?”

“I wasn’t being cruel. I was being honest.”

She shoves at my chest, and I let her. Let her push me back another step, then another. “Something life-changing happened to him last Friday, and your first thought was to mock him about it?”

I catch her wrists before she can shove me again.

“Let go of me!”

I release her, and she stumbles back, chest heaving, eyes wild. My blood is caked under her fingernails and her torn stockings are filthy with dirt and worse.

“You couldn’t resist twisting the knife, could you?” She jabs a finger at the door Kai just fled through. “You couldn’t just tell him what happened and let him process it. You had to punish him for it.”

“I didn’t⁠—“

“Tell him he ‘cried like a pathetic little simp?’” She throws my words back at me laced with acid.

The accusation lands harder than her slap did.

“You know she’s right,” Good Wolf murmurs. “You saw him break.”

I did.

The way his skin went grey. The way his hands began trembling. The way he looked at me like I’d just confirmed his worst fear about himself—not that he wanted me, but that wanting me made him something shameful.

Something wrong.

“He broke because he’s weak,” Bad Wolf growls.

“You were weak once, too,” Good Wolf counters. “They were all weak, once. That’s why they all turned out the way they did.”

I turn away from Haven, my jaw clenching so hard my teeth ache.

I think of the names I’ve collected over the years the way other men collect baseball cards. Rivals I had no choice but to befriend. Each of them had a before, like me. A moment that cracked them open and let something darker flood in.

I’ve had several, all buried deep and without sentiment.

One of them claws its way to the surface, anyway.

I’d just turned seventeen, but my height made it easy to get into bars. Like the one in Boston that was just far enough from campus that no one would recognize me.

He was older—late thirties, thinning hair, but such a charismatic smile. Something about him made my stomach flip in ways I struggled to process.

I was drunk. And…curious. Back then I was still trying to understand why my body responded to certain people the way it did, and why the sick fantasies that kept me up at night weren’t always about women.

He bought me a drink. Touched my arm when he laughed. Held eye contact until my cock twitched.

And while he took the lead, he always waited for my consent.

Respectful. Cautious.

Until he wasn’t.

I shouldn’t have followed him back to his car. But I let his gentle, almost patronizing air lull me into a false sense of security. That, and the alcohol, made me feel safe.