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And as for Alice, well, we’ll just be in a holding pattern until our Hades decides on her eternal fate.
Chapter4
PHOENIX
Stretchingout in a patch of sun, I let myself take comfort in the warmth of the late-afternoon glow. The windows prevent the cold from getting in, and I feel as languid as a house cat—not that I’ve been allowed one, or any sort of companion, in my solitude.
At least, no one but my lovers…and my master. Of course, if Kane heard me calling him that, he’d make me pay for it. He doesn’t mind captor, though, because he knows that’s what he’s done to me. And his guilt over it knows no bounds. The self-flagellating bastard loves when I shove his nose in the metaphorical shitshow he created out of our love life. If that’s what it can be called.
After he found me in a tub on the brink of death and saved me once more, he’d offered me the choice: a bullet or living according to his whim. I’d been too scared to die once he pulled me back from the brink.
I still have moments when the endless nothing where my vision had once been still chokes me. I still feel panicked when my brain decides to become hyperaware of the fact that I have no idea what’s going on around me and that it isn’t just darkness. It’s nothing. It’s absence.
It’s like trying to contemplate literal eternity or infinity.
It’s a wonder I’m not as insane as Ari.
I could hone my other senses all I wanted. I could create new tech that could help me move around and sense how many people are in the room with me, but I’ll never be able to know the truth with my own eyes. Anything I can’t touch becomes abstract and hypothetical. Does the horizon still exist? Does the curvature of the earth? Does the sky? The tops of trees? The love in Kane’s eyes?
The answer to those is yes, but I’ll have to trust the word of those around me for the rest of my life.
My own hubris got me in this position, though. I thought I could be the conquering hero, saving Darragh Walsh from the Romanos and earning my place at Kane’s side instead of being there because he invited me.
Instead, I ended up shot, blown up, blinded, with scars down half my body that would always be slightly numb.
And in my worst moment—where I wanted to give up and just let the darkness consume me—Kane had forced me back into the light I would never see. A small part of me resents him for it, but that’s overshadowed by my resentment at being imprisoned in this fucking castle.
He gives me everything I could ever want… except the freedom to move about on my own. My prison is luxury and softness, sex whenever I want, and three men who would burn the world down for me.
But the fact remains: it is a world I’ll never walk in again. At least, not alone. Not if Kane has anything to say about it.
Years back, James had attempted to break me out, but James had been punished so long and so viciously he never tried it again. I don’t blame him, of course.
If I’d known he was going to do it, I would have warned him.
But James was also young at the time, and he’s the sort of man who has to learn lessons the hard way. I remember the sound of ache in his voice when he finally came to me. I remember the feeling of tender flesh where he’d been bound and the welts on his back that would eventually become scars.
When I asked him what Kane had done, he refused to answer, and I didn’t push. I could have, of course. I know all of his buttons. I know how to get answers from him better than Ari can make each and every captive canary sing in his little playroom.
I still fantasize about getting out—and it’s something I’ll never give up on—but I’m happy to bide my time. We have other, bigger things to handle right now than letting me go on a fucking boardwalk stroll.
Kane’s fixation with taking down Guido Romano in the most painful way possible is finally reaching its crest, and with the phone Ari had given me earlier, I know the first steps are finally being taken. It feels like a breath of fresh air, knowing that the years of waiting and stalking her are finally over.
I’ve never seen Alice, of course, apart from a single, grainy still shot of her during her awkward teen phase at her boarding school.
She’s been the Walshes’ target since she was little, but Kane only recently started obsessing about her. No one knows the lengths we’ve gone to to watch her. No one knows that we can see in every single corner of her little dorm, or her car, or the bars she sneaks out to.
That’s probably my favorite thing about her, if I’m being honest. She’s as trapped as I am, in ways she can see and ways she can’t, but she’s defiant. She’s brave. She spits in the face of her bondage in ways I’ve forgotten how to.
But that’s also the thing I hate most about her. She’s soft, and she’s spoiled. Very little has ever touched her, and while that’s going to change soon, I detest that I haven’t been able to claw my way out from Kane’s suffocating obsession.
It doesn’t matter that I love him—because I do. I have since we were young, reckless kids thinking we were invincible and immortal. But I want to hear the pain in his voice when he realizes he no longer has power over me. I want to hear the anguish while he begs me to stay and the torture it will be as I force him to wait for my answer.
Because even now, I don’t know that I’d walk away if I had the choice.
I think maybe I want him to suffer without the control he thinks he has.
And maybe I don’t.
