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“You did horrible things to me, Reg. I can’t defend you. That’s why I fucking shot you,” I replied and sat back down. I was exhausted already, and seeing Reg had drained the little energy I had left.
“What did he do?” Maksim asked. “Tell me.”
I shook my head. “It’s in the past, and it doesn’t matter.”
Of course, it mattered, but I didn’t want to bring it up again, especially in front of Maksim. Exposing my weakest state like that worried me. It gave my captor more power over me.
“She’s right. There’s no point bringing it up,” Reg agreed. “No point at all.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Maksim said, looking at Avery. “What do you think, my love? Should we force them to expose their deepest, darkest secrets?”
Avery looked embarrassed for once. Ashamed of this entire situation. She appeared almost human for a moment or two, but then it was like a dark mask fell over her face, and she sneered at me. “Of course! I’m dying to know what happened to Everly here. I want to know the horrible life she had when our father abandoned her, too. It makes it easier for me knowing we both suffered.”
“I didn’t suffer once I got my Kings,” I replied, glaring at her. “I won’t ever suffer again as long as I have them.”
“Then we might have to change that, my future bride,” Maksim said, his face twisting into a cruel grimace when he thought about the four men he was rivals with, even though they would never view him in the same way. To them, Maksim was simply a monster. A disgusting animal who had stolen their most precious queen. “We might have to take those Kings away from you and leave you with one lonely man who is desperate for your heart.”
“Desperate?” Avery sneered. “You’re not desperate. You have me!”
“Yes,” Maksim said with a flat, dark voice. “That’s exactly why I am a desperate man. You are all I have, and it’s simply not enough.”
Avery’s face fell, she crumpled it like a child about to throw a tantrum, but she knew the sort of reaction she would get. Maksim wouldn’t give a shit about her feelings, and he wouldn’t react to her meltdown. He wasn’t capable of such a thing.
“Tell me what you did to her,” Maksim demanded from Reg at last. “I want to know everything.”
Reg sighed and began to speak. “It started with The Organization,” he said. “They wanted photos of her because she was such a beautiful, ripe young woman. So fresh and delicious, sweet like honey, I tell you.”
I gagged back bitter bile at the thought of his assaults on my body when I was drugged and unconscious. I still didn’t know when he’d started or the extent of the things he’d done to me. Sometimes I felt as if I didn’t want to know.
He kept talking, though, giving Maksim multiple details whenever he asked. And I heard much more about the abuse I’d suffered than I wanted. It felt like life was piling heaps of horror upon the horror I was facing by being trapped here with Maksim.
“She sounds like she was ready for it,” Maksim said, leaning forward with bright eyes. They were shining with desire, and I could sense him getting hornier as Reg spoke. It was awful. “She wanted it, even.”
Maksim picked up a pear from a tray of food that one of the house staff had brought in, and he began to peel it with a small knife. He did this as he talked, stripping the pear in one long, unbroken, thin spiral.
“I didn’t want it because I didn’t know about it,” I exclaimed. “He drugged me. Can’t you understand that?”
“That’s a convenient excuse,” Maksim sneered. “Very convenient. Looking at the state of your relationship, I wager a guess that you wanted it, all of it. Who else but a whore would live in a house with four men and fuck every one of them? Who else but a nasty little slut would get on her knees and beg for their cocks every night?”
“She didn’t exactly say she wanted it, but I always knew,” Reg said. “I could always tell somewhere inside she understood what was going on. She was always so sweet to me, ready to serve me dinner and wash my clothes for me. She was a perfect little peach, ripe for the picking and juicy for the men who wanted to watch.”
“Exactly what I thought,” Maksim said with a leering grin. “I could smell it on her the minute she showed up in here. You can always tell when a woman wants it badly. She wears it on her like a cloak.”
My face felt red from shame and rage. I should have killed Reg when I had the chance. I should have taken the time to aim the gun and ripped his heart apart. Or shot him again and again until he didn’t get up.
I’d been so stupid back then. I hadn’t known what I was doing.
“She’s a slut. I could tell when I saw her at college,” Avery said as if she was some expert on my sexual history. “She has that reputation, too, which is why it was easy to get her arrested. People don’t like her, so they were lined up, ready to tell the cops that she yelled at her professor. It was hilarious, and if she hadn’t come here, I’m sure I could have gotten her guys to fuck me and forget about her.”
“Fuck you, bitch!” I exclaimed. “Never gonna happen! They think you’re a fucking joke! A clown! A desperate loser!”
I couldn’t believe how much that got to me. I hated that she could get me to react like that, but when my Kings were mentioned, it was a sore spot. I had an instantaneous reaction to them being brought into this, and it reminded me that they were somewhere in this house, so close and yet impossibly far from me.
“I love seeing her fighting spirit,” Maksim said with a smile. He cut a slice off the pear in his hand and popped it in his mouth. He chewed slowly as if ruminating on this new information. He swallowed and continued. “It makes me think about how hard she would have struggled if you had kept her awake. What another missed opportunity, you really dropped the ball on this whole thing with her.”
“I couldn’t let her mother know what was happening,” Reg said, looking pretty proud of himself. “She had to be unconscious, or she would have told somebody about it. She can’t keep her mouth shut. That’s one of the worst things about Everly. She squeals like a little pig to anyone who will listen.”
“Nobody would have paid attention,” I said through clenched teeth. And it was true, back then, I didn’t have anybody in my court. I had myself and Penny, but Penny was relatively powerless in the grand scheme of things. One of the greatest things Ivan and Amara had done for me was to give me the power I now had. I’d never be the shrinking girl like I once was. “I didn’t have anyone back then.”
