Page 73 of The Killer Card

Speaking of which, “You’re engaged to my sister,” I spit, shoving my elbow back to catch his ribs. He’s faster, stopping the blow with his free hand, trapping my arm against my side. “Do you think she’ll ever let you touch her after this?!”

“I think,” his lips ghost along the shell of my ear and I involuntarily flinch again, revealing the discomfort and fear that only seems to turn him on more. I can feel it, his arousal firm against my backside. “She will do exactly as she is told because that is how your grandfather raised her to be. Obedient. Pliant. Your sister is not a fighter. But that’s alright…”

His hand slides around to the front of my throat, squeezing, his other moving around to touch me through my jeans. I hate that my body reacts to his touch, that despite desperately not wanting this, biology is working against me because all it does is feed his narrative that he has the right to do this to me. That’s how it’s always been. Every woman who has ever paid to use me justify their actions by the natural reaction of my body beneath theirs.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I try in vain to fight but he’s just slightly taller than me. He’s stronger. He’s not malnourished. He’s a full-grown man with money and time and the power to make anyone he wants bend to his will. He believes he deserves all of the world, just like every other rich fuck that walks through our front door. I’m just one more peasant to him. I’m everything my grandfather has made me. I’m expendable. I’m weak. I’m worth less than the dirt on this man’s shoes. I don’t need to know what he paid for me, it was most certainly less than he paid for the belt around his waist.

I don’t want this.

I don’t want this.

I don’t want this.

“You’ll always be here, won’t you?” His sister finally backs away from me, her heels clicking across the old wooden floors. “Your sister can be the respectable wife in the day, and you can be my little wolf in the night.”

The door to the attic clicks shut and my eyes burst open just as Rossi shoves me face first into my own bed. My struggle ramps up by ten and I manage to catch him first in the thigh with my sneaker and then in the nose with the back of my head. He curses and grunts and struggles to keep me down. The position does me no favors, but I try to crawl out from under him anyway when only one of his hands is left to pin me down—

The familiar cold press of metal against my temple makes me freeze. “That’s quite enough.” Risking a glance over my shoulder I’m left shaking in terror at the furious heat in his dark eyes. There’s blood drying on his lip from his nose and he licks it away with a feral growl. There’s a sharp click as he cocks the gun. I stop breathing. “A little wolf you might be, but even wolves can be tamed by the threat of death.”

He reaches up, touching the blood still left dripping from his nose. “You put up a good fight. You made me bleed. Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

Gripping my hair, he forces my face into the mattress, muffling my protests. But my cries of pain and pleading echo loudly in my soul, ringing in my head, until I feel something fundamental inside me shatter into a thousand jagged pieces…

In the darkness of an attic tower…

In a house where I will never be safe so long as I live.

✽✽✽

I wait over an hour after he’s gone to move again.

It hurts. Everything hurts, but I force myself up. I button my jeans, but I don’t reach for a shirt. There’s blood on my back, my neck, the indents of teeth in places I can’t even reach.

I can’t stop shaking. My legs tremble so badly I have to hold onto the wall as I creep down the attic stairs. I need the bathroom. I need the shower. That’s all I can think as I slip into the quiet hall. Bathroom. Shower. Bathroom. Shower.

Don’t think about the pain. Just keep moving.

Bathroom. Shower.

Cruel, rumbling laughter floating down the hall stops me before I reach the bathroom door. Instinctively, I know I should avoid that laughter, but something about this fugue state makes me follow it instead.

The door to my grandfather’s study is cracked open enough that I don’t have to look too hard to see inside. There’s a fire roaring. In front of it Andrei and my grandfather sit together, drinking brandy, smoking cigars, and laughing…

“How much did they pay you for the Domovoy?”

Grandfather snorts. “More than the usual. You know his kind are willing to pay extra for the discretion. I assured him no one would know a thing about his… Proclivities.”

They’re laughing at me, I realize. A hot wave of rage boils in my gut, my fists clenching at my sides. I’d hoped perhaps that Ms. Rossi was the one who came to my grandfather. That she paid for my time to cover up her brother’s proclivities, as my grandfather called them.

But Grandfather knew.

Mr. Rossi- his granddaughter’s fiancé- came to him and asked to use me and he accepted the money with a shake of his fucking hand and directions to my room.

Men can’t fuck other men, but Grandfather doesn’t see me as a man. He doesn’t see me as his grandson, blood of his blood. I’m nothing more than a pawn he can sell to whomever pays the right price. I’m his to abuse until the day I’m put in ground either by Andrei or himself.

My mother may have brought me into this world, but he didn’t blink an eye when her husband took her out of it. He won’t lift a finger when Sonya’s husband does the same to her. All the while using me to disrespect her in the shadows.

Tears fill my eyes. I’m in pain, my body ravaged and bruised, blood still trickling down my back to pool at the base of my spine. My legs only hold me up by sheer power of will. I’m done. I’m fucking done. I won’t take this anymore, not for another fucking second, but if I’m going down I’m taking the devil with me.