“What makes you think I want that?”
I raise my chin proudly, daring him to challenge me on this.
“What makes you think you have a choice in the matter?”
His words are so cruel and devoid of emotion, they hit me almost harder than when his uncle tells me the same thing. With a snarl, I smack the spoon out of his hand, but the next moment, his powerful fingers wrap tightly around my wrist.
“Are you forgetting your manners, Rain?”
“You sound just like him,” I spit out, knowing just how deep my words must cut him. “I should’ve known you were both the same. Instead, I got fooled by both Gunns.”
“Shut your mouth.”
He merely mutters the phrase, but his tone is enough to get me to do what he wants. My heart speeds up as we stare at one another like we’re having a blinking contest.
“You don’t want to stay with me?” he finally asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”
My mind and heart battle between two answers. Finally, I settle on the one that breaks me.
“I want to go back. Anything would be better than this.”
Heath approaches me, and I shrink away from his menacing figure.
“You want to go back to him, to Xavier? You want to keep enduring everything he put you through just to prove a point?”
“I’m not proving a point,” I grind out. “I’m saying anything would be better than this fucking torture.”
His eyes burn as he squeezes my wrist painfully, asking, “What is this fucking torture, to be exact?”
“Being with you. Around you. Near you. At least with Xavier, I knew he was bad news from the start,” I spit out. “With you, I was foolish enough to believe you were good. Like Nana, like me. It hurts how wrong I was.”
His other hand forms a fist and I shiver in fear of what he’s capable of doing. But he doesn’t strike me and doesn’t hurt me. Instead, he seems in pain from realizing just how much I despise him.
“I’m nothing like my uncle,” he finally says, his voice pained. “But if that’s what you prefer... fine. I won’t get involved.”
“Good,” I hiss, feeling a lump in my throat forming. “I don’t want you to.”
The lie feels bitter on my lips and I feel terrible as he picks himself up, avoiding my gaze. Whatever hint of emotion I saw in him earlier was gone yet again, his face wiped off any trace of it. He’s back to being the ruthless killer I don’t recognize. My heart weeps and mourns for the boy with charcoal eyes I was once in love with.
Unlike the Casa, I haven’t been given instructions not to wander around the house.
I’m grateful for that later that night when I keep tossing and turning, unable to catch a wink of sleep. I decide to get up, wrapping myself in a silk pink robe trimmed with lace. I softly open the door of my bedroom, realizing there are guards in a room down the hall. They’re laughing and talking in a foreign language, all of them too distracted to notice me slipping out.
I wander down the hallway, trying to make an impression of my newest prison. That’s when I hear the noise, like a groan of pain and pleasure combined.
My brows knit together in worry at the sound. Whoever that is... they sound like they’re hurting.
Following the sound of the voice, I come to a room where the door has been left ajar. Light spills from under the door, and I press my front against it, carefully peeking inside the room.
And there he is, Heath in all his glory. He’s wearing a pair of dark gray slacks that match his eyes and nothing else. I can see the outline of his already hard cock through the fabric. His chest has so many pronounced muscles they look like tightly bound rope underneath his skin. The muscles flex as he yanks open a drawer in his desk and pulls out a plastic bag.
Horrified and as silent as I can be, I watch Heath sterilize a syringe and pump it full of clear liquid. My eyes widen even more as he slams the needle into his forearm, releasing the poison into his bloodstream.
I blink fast, not sure whether I’m seeing correctly. Surely Heath isn’t taking drugs? Not my Heath, not the boy I fell in love with in the poppy fields...
But as I watch him repeat the same steps and shoot another injection into his arm, I realize he is. It makes me wonder what exactly happened all those years he’s been away. Xavier’s plan worked. He’s broken the last innocent love I had - the one for Heath. Now, I can’t see him as anything other than a monster.
My pupils dilate almost as much as Heath’s as I watch him pull out his cock. I swallow thickly, watching him massage the cockhead and moving down the shaft, making himself groan with each stroke of his meaty palms.