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We need to talk.
I can’t deal with that right now, can’t deal with him. I’m raw, my shell cracked open and left in ruins, the way only Colt can manage. I can’t let Baron get to me right now.
If I open my messages, he’ll see that I read it and ignored him, so I only read the messages on the home screen. My heart cracks down the center, and tears of hope fill my eyes when I see that he’s not the only one who sent a message.
TheseDarkWoods: This can’t be the end.
TheseDarkWoods: Where are you?
TheseDarkWoods: I’ll wait for you in your room.
Rylan.
He came through for me. Some part of the boy I loved is left inside him.
He’s not done.
The butterfly inside me lifts her wings, reaching for the barest sliver of hope shining through every jagged crack in my armor.
Maybe when he almost lost me, he saw that he can’t let me go any more than I can let him. We’re bound together by the ties of our old life, when things were good for both of us. After all he did to get here, he can’t let it be for nothing. He told me that. Maybe we’re both holding onto a fantasy, something precious from a past that doesn’t exist anymore, but I’m not alone in that. I’m not alone, and that’s as much as I have any right to hope for.
I’m not naïve enough to think he’s forgiven me. But I need someone right now, and he’s all I have. The alternative is the Dolce boys, the boys who chose me and groomed me to be their female counterpart, and then threw me away at the first sign that I’m human. I don’t even want to think about why they want to talk to me. One day, they’re going to kill me.
But it won’t be today.
Rylan’s not like them. He’s normal. Sure, he’s angry, but his roughness is the kind that any boy would dish out when he’s been hurt by the girl he loves. When he punishes me, I deserve it.
It’s worth enduring a little pain just to know I have someone on my side, that he can’t quit me, even when everyone else has. To have something familiar and comforting, even if it’s bittersweet and painful and nothing like the dream of puppy love that kept me going for so long. Pain is better than nothing. If you work hard enough, you can even trick your brain into thinking it feels like pleasure, like love. I’ve been doing it for so long I don’t even have to try anymore.
I climb the stairs, my mind spinning with so many conflicting impulses I can’t keep up. When I reach the top, I stop in the shadowy hallway. The only light is coming from my room, where the door stands open about a foot. I see a shadowy figure move opposite the door, and I freeze, my breath catching in my throat.
Maybe I don’t get to decide whether I die today after all.
But then he steps through the light, and then past it, coming toward me, and I see he’s not big enough, his hair not dark enough, his eyes not feral enough.
“Cotton,” I choke out. “What are you doing here?”
“Stepbro just needed a little backup,” he says, taking my elbow and marching me toward my room. I try to plant my heels, but he gives a little jerk, and I stumble forward, unable to combat his strength. He may not be a Dolce boy, but like all their lackeys, he fits a very specific mold—he’s an athlete, toned and muscular, and over six feet tall.
And this time, I don’t have a gun.
“Let me go,” I grit out, but he drags me into the light streaming from my partially open door and steps behind me, twisting my arm behind my back. His other hand clamps over my mouth before I can protest.
I don’t know him well, despite the fact that we’ve been in the elite social group together for three years, and we’ve seen each other without clothes on more than one occasion. We keep a wary distance. I know he likes to fuck unconscious girls, and he knows how truly fucked up I am, and neither of us are quite comfortable with the other knowing the worst thing about the other.
He doesn’t push me into the room, the way I expect. Instead, he holds me there, giving me time to register what’s happening in my room.
Rylan is lying on his back on my bed, his pants around his knees, while Eleanor rides his dick. Everleigh is on his face, dragging her pussy from his nose to his chin while he grips her thighs.
“Usually the little creep likes to watch, but tonight, he wanted to be seen,” Cotton mutters into my ear, sounding amused by the whole thing.
I try to turn away, but his grip tightens. “Watch,” he growls, nudging my arm higher up my back until I gasp out in pain. He could break my arm, end my cheer career, but he doesn’t. For all his creepy, loathsome predilections, Cotton Montgomery is not a sadist. In all the years we’ve lived next door, the orgies the Dolces have dragged us both into, he’s never hurt me. For all I know, he was as reluctant to participate as I was. Somehow, in this moment of shock when my brain still hasn’t comprehended what’s happening before us, but it knows it’s going to hurt, I find solace in that.
I lean back into Cotton, reassured that at least he won’t hurt me. He won’t push me into the room. He won’t force me to do anything I don’t want to do. At least not violently. He tried to blackmail me once, and it didn’t work out so well. Maybe this is his payback. I have no doubt he reveled in my downfall today, that he crowed with the rest of them that I got what I had coming. We’ve had a healthy hatred for each other since that fateful night last year, when I did the worst thing I’ve ever done.
Now we’re bound together by it, just like I’m bound to the boy in my room, the boy fucking my sisters on my bed. The boy who told me to come upstairs because he knew I’d see this and it would break me. And he must really know me after all, even after all this time and all the ways in which we’ve both changed, because he’s right.
I don’t try to move again. I sag into Cotton, my knees giving way. Silent tears track down my cheeks, over his fingers still clamped around my face. I can’t remember when I started crying for boys again. Maybe it’s not for boys at all. Maybe it’s for girls, the girls in my room who know what this will do to me.
