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“That’s when I swung the bucket as hard as I could at his head. Then I did it again. And again, and again. When the handle finally broke off, I used my bare feet until all I could feel was wet pulp squelching between my toes.”
She looks horrified and heartbroken, but she needs to hear this. Not because she needs to know the full extent of the hell I was in.
She needs to know you can get out the other side.
“I used the broken pieces of the bucket to kill two more guards upstairs. Then I stole a car and drove right to our place on Central Park South. One of my dad’s top guys happened to be the one downstairs when I staggered out of the car, and he swept me up directly to my dad’s office.” I laugh coldly. “No medical attention. No seeing my siblings, who were probably scared shitless that I was dead. None of that. Right to the mad king’s throne room.”
My lips twist bitterly.
“As it turned out, my siblings weren’t scared I was dead becausehe hadn’t told themanything bad was going on with me. He’d told them I was at space camp.” I laugh a dark, barking laugh, pure poison in my veins. “Space camp. No one except him and a select chosen few even knew I’d been kidnapped, because my dad had spent the last two weeks trying tohaggle down the fucking termsof my release.”
Her face falls, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now as she stares at me in abject horror.
“That’s why I was down there so long with that piece of shit in that hellish basement. My father was trying to figure out exactly how few crack-dealing street corners he could trade for his own son.”
She throws her arms around me, hugging my stiff frame as her tears soak my shirt.
“Ienjoyedkilling that motherfucker and the two others in the house,” I murmur. “And it awoke something in me.”
Jesus, this is so much more than she ever needs to hear or know about me. But I’ve never talked about this to anyone, and now that it’s started tumbling out of me, I can’t shut the fuck up.
“A few months later, I started keeping tabs on all of them—the entire Turkish gang who’d been fighting with us. I kept notes on them, watched them….” My lips curl. “And then I started to hunt the fuckers down, one by one, until there weren’t any left. It took a while, because eventually the organization broke up and went into hiding. But I did it. I got every single one of them. The last was during spring break my sophomore year at Knightsblood. My friends all partied on a tropical beach or went skiing in Europe…” I shrug. “I went to Slovenia. I found the last of them, working as a janitor in Ljubljana, living under a fake name in a shithole apartment, and I cut his throat.”
I lift her chin, her green eyes and tear-stained cheeks lifting to meet my gaze. And it’s like something clicks. Maybe it’s sharing my trauma, or knowing she’s got it, too. But slowly, like a breath held far too long finally releasing, I forgive her.
For the pain. For the betrayal. For what she took from me.
I just—let it go.
“I amtwicethe monster you think I am, Dahlia,” I growl quietly.
She sobs, shaking her head firmly before suddenly cupping my cheeks.
“You’re not a monster, Deimos,” she chokes as tears trickle down her face. “You’re what kills the monsters.”
And then her lips sear to mine, kissing away all the poison and the pain; the damage, and the darkness.
She tells me about her own monsters—the man who lived upstairs from her mother and her in their first luxury apartment in Paris. The well-off, well-dressed man with a family of his own, who was alwayssokind to Adele and Dahlia. The man who’d give her candy when they saw each other in the lobby or the elevator.
The man who came to help with Dahlia when Adele wasn’t feeling good one night. Who made Adele some tea, and laced it with Rohypnol, and smiled while she drank it.
The man who then slipped into Dahlia’s room while she slept and pinned her to the bed. Who crawled on top of her and told her to be his good girl and not say a word as he put his hands on her.
Hearing her tearfully choke out the awful tale puts me in a place so volatile I’m worried I’m going to explode like a bomb. It makes me want to scream and roar and commit acts of pure evil and unspeakable violence until the smell of blood obliterates everything else.
Then she tells me how Adeledidn’tin fact pass out, because she recognized the effects of the Rohypnol at the first sip from when Dahlia’s father used to give it to her, and she dumped out the rest of the tea. How she staggered, only half-awake, through the kitchen, grabbed a chef’s knife, and lurched down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom.
…How she stabbed that man from upstairsforty-nine timesand let him bleed out on the floor. And finally, how Adrian Cross took them home to his place and took care of the whole thing, sweeping it all under the rug so nothing would ever come back to Adele which would cause her to lose Dahlia.
When the whole story is lying like bodies at our feet, I hold her tightly in my arms as she sobs and wails into my chest. As she screams out her demons and then slams her mouth to mine. As she tells me that she needs me, and needs it to be hard, to block the rest of it out.
Honestly, so do I.
Fucking Dahlia is always a release for me. But tonight, it’s catharsis for both of us. It’s like water dumped on the roaring forest fires of both our pasts, dousing them forever. It’s brutal and raw, and when we fuck, it’s like gods fighting.
Over and over, we keep going until we’re both raw and sore. Until there’s nothing left to give.
And then we do it again.
