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I just felt… nothing.
Nothing.
And as bad as I knew the alternative could be, I couldn’t help wondering if this – the nothing – was maybe somehow worse.
It was enough to make me irate.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I told myself, and then rinsed off and left the shower, wrapping myself in my most comfortable robe.
I’d cleaned my room countless times since the assault, and my mother had, and so had Keira and Maite, but I still felt like I could smell him. Maybe I’d just never noticed the way that bastard had permeated the energy in here, even before he had resorted to...this.
I’d gone about my affair with him all wrong. He never should have been allowed in my space, never should’ve been able to get so close. I was so wary of Onyx, meanwhile the snake in the grass was right in front of me, in plain fucking sight.
I… couldn’t believe how stupid I was.
Blowing out a sigh, I looked at my bed again.
Tried to tell myself his presence had been removed with the soiled sheets we’d burned in the backyard.
My mother wanted me to come stay with her.
Brandon wanted me to come stay with him.
They weren’t the only ones who thought it was too much for me to still be in the space where my assault had happened. Keira and Maite were just waiting on the smallest shred of a sign and they’d be packing my shit.
But this wasmyspace.
And being expected to leave it felt like I was being forced to make a concession, felt like giving him somethingmorewithout permission. I loved my house, loved the way I’d decorated, loved the memories I’d had built here.
This was my safe haven, my sanctuary.
Why did he get to take that away too?
Everything is fucked.
I knew Onyx had found the motherfucker, that he was locked away somewhere, rotting in a windowless room. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to actually do anything with that information.
I understood why they hadn’t just killed him, but I almost wished they had.
This was something I didn’t want to think about—I didn’twantto be a killer.
It was one thing to be willing to defend myself in the moment, to assert the kind of dominance that created a bubble of protection around us.
I could do that without a second thought.
Calculating it was something else.
Vividly, I remembered our fathers sitting us down to tell us how they’d come to choose the nameThe Predatorsfor the club. It was never supposed to be a warning to anybody else—it was a reminder tous.
Of human nature.
It was a reminder of humanity’s failings, moral and otherwise.
We were predators and had to decide how to navigate that responsibility. The leader of the pack did what was necessary to take care of the rest, he worked for his community. This was common among predators in the wild. They didn’t kill just because, they didn’t eat when they weren’t hungry. They didn’t stalk and terrorize forfun.
For gratification.
Human predators were the ones that preyed on the vulnerable just because they could.
