Page 19

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m drunk, and I never sleep well when I’m drunk.

Or maybe it’s that, even with Wraith tied up, even though I know I’m in a ‘safe’ house, it’ll be a long, long time before I really feel safe enough to sleep deeply. If ever. Because the right to feel truly safe when I’m asleep is something that was taken from me with violence and terror.

Whatever it is, something wakes me up.

Something makes me sit up in bed.

Something turns my eyes toward the kitchen.

To see Wraith.

Wraith.

Standing there, free, hands and legs unbound, gimp gag out of his mouth, blindfold off his eyes, and a knife in his hands.

A knife in his hands and a smile on his face.

My heart hammers and I can’t help it — I scream.

Scream something wordless and not-human; scream something pulled from those years of my life where I didn’t feel like a human, where I felt like some possession, ordered and terrorized around and completely at the whim of the monster I called my boyfriend.

Scream with everything in my shattered, shaking heart.

“June, calm down,” he says, still holding the kitchen knife. That steel blade shines menacingly at me. Shines just like the predatory glint of his smile. He waves it as he gestures for me to obey the two words that have never, ever worked on someone suffering mortal terror for their life: calm down.

I shouldn’t have tied him up. I shouldn’t have tried to solve my problems myself. No. What I should’ve done is called Evan and let him and the Devils take Wraith’s lifeless body off my hands.

This is what I get for trying to be kind.

No more.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Not again. Not like this. Not me, flat on my back, frozen, while a man with a knife decides what happens to me next. I did that. I lived that. I survived that, and I swore — I swore, on every bruise, on every scar, on every night I spent curled against a wall willing myself to disappear — that I would never be that person again. That I would never go small and still and silent while someone with power over me dictated my future.

I am not doing that again.

I am not.

The scream is still ringing off the walls of my apartment when I throw back the covers and my feet hit the floor and I am moving; I am already moving, before the rational part of my brain has even finished processing the image — Wraith, free, knife, smiling — because the rational part of my brain is not in charge right now. Something older is. Something that lives below thought, below language, in the part of me that was forged in captivity and terror and the kind of survival that doesn’t ask permission.

The whip is on the nightstand.

I grab it.

The handle fits my palm like it did in The Love Hole, like it was made for exactly this, like the universe had the audacity to give me one thing tonight that works the way it’s supposed to, and I spin toward him with the coil of it swinging loose at my side and I am still screaming. Screaming. Every scream of rage and terror and hate that I held back, that I choked down, all those times he forced me into submission.

I won’t be silent anymore.

I raise the whip and I run toward him, determined; I would rather die before I go back to being his possession.

I scream.

“I won’t let you hurt me anymore.”

Chapter Nine