“It wasn’t right.” I’m whispering now. I’m shaking with anger and something else. I remember the way he’d look at me back then, like I was a slug beneath his boot, especially when his pack of crony friends were around. All of those guys are long gone—they were rich boys having fun with a real wolf, and now they’re all probably working for their mommies and daddies doing taxes for the truly rich, if I had to guess—but Casso was their king. He was their emperor, their leader. They worshiped the ground he walked on because he wasn’t afraid to take what he wanted like they were.
When they weren’t around, Casso was even worse.
It wasn’t the disdain that killed me. I could understand that—our families were at war. We hated each other because we had to hate each other. Too much blood was spilling, too much was at stake not to.
No, when Casso and I were alone back then, he looked at me like he wanted to devour me. Like all that teasing, that fighting, that bullying, all that was an excuse to get closer and closer to me. I remember his hands on my body, his teeth near my throat, his sneering smirks, his muscular arms pinning me up against a bathroom stall, his breathing fast and frenzied. I was terrified, but I was also pulsing with want every time he came near, like my body anticipated his touch and craved it.
A sick, sick addiction. Like the pain was somehow worth it.
“We were at war,” he says. “I was powerless back then, just a kid trying to understand the world. The war seemed so big, and I had no sway in my family, not yet at least. I ran my little crew with Nico, but we were still coming up. You seemed like the only way I could help my family.”
“By making my life miserable? It didn’t do a thing for the war.”
“No, you’re right, it didn’t. But back then I wanted it to.”
I lean my chin on my knees. “Is that why you wouldn’t leave me alone? Why you kept at it?”
“That’s a big part of it,” he says and shifts closer. “But you know why else.”
I shake my head, trembling. Maybe from the cold, maybe from the memory of him hurting me, again and again. “Don’t start talking about that night. We promised.”
But he keeps going. “That’s the other piece to all this. For all the hours I spent wanting to break your neck, I spent just as much time thinking about stripping you down in the locker room and fucking you senseless. Can you imagine what it was like? I despised you and wanted to see your family burn, and yet I wanted to fuck you so badly it hurt my skin to be anywhere near you. I took my anger out on you, Olivia, but I don’t think I was angry with you. I think I was angry with myself. I only wanted to destroy you.”
I blink back tears. Cool wind blows across my cheeks, along my lips. “That night was a mistake.” I’m whispering again. I can’t look up. I can’t move an inch or I might crack and shatter, and that would be even worse than admitting to him that I wanted all that just as badly as he did.
“It was a mistake,” he says and his hand grazes across my neck, fingertips brushing my hair aside and moving down my back. “But it was a good mistake. Tell me you don’t think about it still. Because, princess, I think about it all the time, I’ve thought about you for years.”
“Casso.”
“You do, I know you do. I tasted it when I kissed you. I can see it all over you now. You’re trembling and it isn’t that cold. You’re thinking about what it was like to finally give in and it’s terrifying because it’s so good. Submission, quiet, gentle submission can be its own form of ecstasy. Its own form of power. You give yourself to me, and in doing so you allow me to make you feel things you never once in your life dreamed you could feel. Otherwise, what’s the point? You can keep on breathing your drab little breaths and living your sad little life, but deep down you know you’d rather let me own you.”
I bite back tears. His words are hot irons shoved down my throat because of their truth and because of what they’re hiding. What he doesn’t mention is behind all that pleasure is even more pain waiting to scar me, break me, ruin me.
“I don’t want to help you. I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want any of this.”
“I don’t want any of it either, princess. But you’re here.” He grabs my hair and pulls it tight and I gasp, half a moan, half a grunt of pain. That’s him, pleasure and pain. “And I’m not letting you go.”