My heart thunders as I desperately think back to last night, to what happened after I was practically dragging myself along the wall just to keep myself up. How did I get from the hallway outside the downstairs guest bedroom to Ember’s closet all the way upstairs?
I could hardly walk. My head was spinning. My arms and legs felt like I had lead pulsing through my veins.
I was drugged. That’s the only explanation for it.
Someone must have put something in my drink, and at some point, I blacked out. But … Sara.
I bumped into Sara. I spilled her drink all over her dress and she was going to help me find the boys. I asked her to help me find King and she said that she’d take me to get her phone. She dragged me along, holding me up, and I thought I was safe.
She took me to a room and dropped me onto a hard bench and then … my jacket.
Tears fill my eyes as I come to the realization of what had happened last night. She took off my jacket and put her hands on my body. She kissed my neck and the drugs took over. I lost all sense of what was right and wrong.
I thought Cruz was touching me.
Sara stripped me naked and took advantage of me while I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop her.
She took away my ability to consent, she stole my trust in womankind, and she abused my body for her own personal, disgusting gain.
She saw me.
She touched me.
She put her fingers inside me and closed her mouth over the most private, intimate part of my body.
She took the one thing I promised would only ever belong to the four men in my life. She stole from me and I will never forgive or forget it.
She left me there, alone and vulnerable in a house filled with hundreds of drunk teenagers. Anything could have happened to me. I should consider myself lucky that Grayson found me in Ember’s closet, but luck is not what any sane person would call being drugged, sexually abused, and left vulnerable.
How am I supposed to tell the boys what she did? I don’t … I don’t even think I know what it is. What classifies as being raped? Is that even what happened or did I urge her on? Moaning and wanting more when I thought it was Cruz?
I was drunk. I know I didn’t verbally consent to it, but did I allow it to happen in other ways?
Fuck. I don’t know.
I stare up at the ceiling as the boys talk among themselves, completely oblivious to the mental trauma taking over me as I silently cry in the back of Carver’s Escalade.
An hour passes and then another, and before I know it, the remaining drugs in my system quickly catch up to me. And as my mind tries to make sense of the night for the millionth time, my exhaustion takes over and I fall into a fretful sleep.
When a soft, chilly breeze hits my skin, I wake to find four pissed-off guys staring down at me with anger shining brightly in their eyes.
“Well, shit,” I tell them, sitting up and stretching out my cramped body, deciding to keep my new horrors to myself. “About time you found me. Do you know how squished I was in there?”
I climb out of the back of the Escalade, grinning to myself as each of the guys just stare at me, completely dumbfounded. My feet hit the road and I step out from around the back of the Escalade to find nothing but rolling mountains. “So, where the hell are we?”
Carver is the first to regain control. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
CHAPTER 16
I stare out at the beautiful manor home situated right in the middle of the most exotic mountains that I’ve ever seen. This was the home my parents built—well, the one that Carver’s father burned down and Dynasty had rebuilt to pay their respects.
“Holy shit,” I breathe, completely blown away by its beauty. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Did my father really build this?”
“Yep,” Cruz says, laying his hand on my thigh as we all stare out the side windows of the Escalade, looking up the long driveway, past the iron gates to the home that sits at the top of the mountain. “Well, that’s the story, at least. Apparently, your parents had designed every little aspect of the home. It took them years to complete.”
“So, it’s exactly the same as before it got burned down?”
King shrugs his shoulders beside me. “I’d assume so,” he mutters, looking past me, out the window to the big house. Though something tells me the boys are looking at the mansion with very different intentions than I am. I just want to see the beauty of it and feel a fraction of what my parents must have felt when they got to see it for the first time. The boys just want to case the joint and figure out if my crazy mother is still living here or not. “The interior and furniture would be different than what your parents had. They mostly kept this place private, so it was probably styled for what was modern at the time it was rebuilt, which would have been slightly different to your parents’ personal taste.”