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I remember the wake of it, when he had stopped tending, and he found the bloom of the bruise on my shoulder in the shape of his fingers. You could see the outline of each of them, the way he’d crushed me in his grasp. He feathered his fingers over it and his jaw twitched.

He pushed my clothes out of the way to find all of the places he’d marked me.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked me, brushing his fingers over green-purple marks on my hips and thighs.

“I’m yours now,” I said. “There’s your claim right there, all over me.”

And we were bonded, and I felt him in the bond.

That turned him on, Leo.

He didn’t have sex with me, then. He very valiantly abstained from that with me for months afterward, but eventually, he came back to me.

It would usually be late at night. I’d wake up to him being in the room with me, and he’d make me lie face down on the bed, and he’d grip the back of my neck and tell me that I was not to make any noise of any kind, and that I had to hold entirely still, and he’d just fuck me like that. A lot of times, he said your name, if that pleases you, I don’t know. He’d lick his bite on my neck and moan your name.

I know.

This is my own fault.

I did this to myself.

The day after it happened, I remember that I hobbled around the house, because I was so sore—not just from all the bruises but because somehow, our sex had been incredibly athletic, and I’d used all these muscles in my core that I wasn’t used to using, and muscles in my legs, too. It hurt to move.

I sat outside, looking out at the pool, which we had just closed for the fall so it was covered over, and I watched the sunrise. I remember feeling choked and guilty and broken. I remember thinking that it was a nightmare, that it had to be a nightmare, that I would wake up and it wouldn’t have happened. I remember feeling like I didn’t know myself, not at all, like a stranger was living inside me, and that I wanted to just… kill her. Strangle her. Get rid of her so that I could be the person I actually wanted to be.

But the worst thing about it was how the sun was just coming up like always, how the world was just going on like nothing had happened, and I was entirely altered forever. Everyone hurt, and I had done it. And the sun just came up anyway, taunting me, acting as if I could let it go, could forgive myself, could move on. I could see the future, and I had never been able to see any future before, and I recoiled from it.

I hated myself.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

OH, BULLSHIT I was never that for him, Opal.

Fuck you, yes, I was a receptacle for his darkness.

When he came to me and I was thin and gaunt and sick and he just kept unzipping his fucking pants. Here it is, there you go, this’ll help, that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want my cock.

I guessed it was easier to let it slide because it hurt him when I put my mouth on him, because he’d grit his teeth as I latched on and moaned around his cock. Even though, eventually, no matter how much he was in pain, he got hard through it anyway. Maybe he grew to like the pain in the way that I liked the bond sickness.

I didn’t really like it, obviously. It was awful.

But I could have stopped it. He could have stopped it. We didn’t stop it.

After Vincent and I had lunch, it was awkward.

He didn’t tell me again that I had the wrong idea, and I didn’t say something about how we were practically brother and sister. We just mutually parted ways, both of us commenting on what a good idea it had been to have brought two cars. I stayed at the square, walking around for a while, and then I sat down on a bench to read a little more of Opal’s manifesto.

Now, I was hopping mad.

If that woman was not already dead, I would kill her myself.

She wanted it to be a nightmare?

She felt guilty afterwards?

Cry me a river, Opal, because you did not have to do it. And I had about had it with the way she kept taking responsibility and also not taking responsibility. Obviously, she had a plan, she had thought it all through lots of times, and then she pulled the trigger on it. She wanted to split hairs and say that it was impulsive, but that’s not impulsive. Her behavior wasn’t impulsive. She was a liar. I hated her.

The problem was that her description of Damian rang so very, very true in some ways.