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I can’t tell her what she wants. I can’t say what she needs. But I can say I won’t be the one who breaks her. “I’m not your fucking master,” I growl.
She crawls forward. She kisses my dirty shoe.
I smother the reflex to kick her away. Alix isn’t the enemy. I won’t fight the woman I love.
But it’s a damn good thing she already shredded Klaus Herzog on my dining room floor. Because if she hadn’t, I’d hunt the cocksucker down, tie him to his goddamn frame, and take him apart with a pair of red-hot pliers.
“Alix,” I say, sinking onto the floor beside her. “Princess.”
She’s sobbing, desperate, pressing her face into the fucking rug. Her begging sounds like the world’s most fucked-up prayer; she wants me to do things that can’t be possible, that no human body can bear. The fact that she can evensaythose words turns my stomach, and I fight the urge to puke.
I catch her wrists, pulling them close to my chest to keep her from grinding her mouth into the carpet. “Stop it!” I shake her shoulders to reinforce the order. When she tells me how she wants me to rip apart her snatch, I bellow, “Shut your fucking mouth!”
She cowers before me, trembling with terror or the after-rush of adrenaline. I don’t know which of us is breathing harder; we both sound like hurricanes. Still gripping her wrists, I shift so that my back leans against the leather chair.
“Alix,” I say, searching for words. “Sweet, sweet Alix. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve any of this.”
She wails. The sound starts low, but it slides high. It’s the sound of utter sorrow, of perfect loss. It’s broken dolls and buried pets and mean girls whispering by lockers. It’s choosing a brother over the rest of a family and losing him to the devil. It’s losing innocence, day after day, night after night, minute by fucking minute in this hellhole.
“What can I do?” she finally asks. “How can I be worthy?”
I don’t understand. Her words make no sense.
Until they do.
I said she didn’tdeserveto suffer. I meant it wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But she’s too broken to hear that. She heard she isn’t worthy. She’s not good enough to torture.
“Fucking Christ.” I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to clear the rubble, how to reach her fractured foundation. But there’s no way to build anything on an utterly shattered base.
“I thought you loved me,” she whispers.
I’m almost too tired to say the words out loud, but I owe them to her. “I do.”
“I thought you’d do anything for me.”
The truth is nearly too heavy to lift. “I thought so too.”
“But you won’t do this.”
“No. I won’t.”
“I’m asking for it. I accept it. I’m giving myself to you, making you my master.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Jesus Christ. Does it matter?”
“You were happy enough to hurt me when it helped you. When your Beast told you to do it.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“I always gave you a safeword, gave you protection. I never took away your choice. You were never my slave. You are my partner.”
“Are,” she says, repeating the verb I just used.
