Kill Switch (Devil's Night 3)

“You want to know why he didn’t take you home?” I asked her, hitting the locks so she couldn’t jump out. “He doesn’t like virgins. He never wants to be that important to someone, and it’s a lot less complicated to fuck people who know there’s a difference between sex and love.”

She turned her gaze from Will to Kai to me, fear in her eyes.

Sex and love.

Boys will be boys, and she teased you, didn’t she? She wouldn’t let you have it, I heard my mother’s voice in my head.

Sex was power. Degrading, filthy, mean, unclean power.

Love always hurt. Sooner or later.

“Where are we going?” Rika demanded.

But I ignored her. “You saw the girl at the old church today,” I mused, remembering her in the catacombs watching the guy and girl on our first Devil’s Night stop. “You liked it, didn’t you?”

I turned left, down a dark gravel road, and I saw her try to peer out the front windshield to see where we were going.

“You wanted to be her,” I said. “Pushed down on that floor and fucked…”

Because even as unclean and degrading as sex was, the feelings were strong, and they were real. Sex and fear were the only things that made you real.

Little girls just don’t understand what boys need, my mother would say.

It was the one thing she was right about. We didn’t need anything we didn’t take ourselves. No questions, no tears, no touching or soft words… Just fucking sit there and don’t try to be special.

“You know why?” I asked Rika. How I knew she wanted to be that girl, pushed down and fucked? “Because it feels good. And we’ll make you feel so good if you let us.”

Her eyes raced from Kai to me to the locked doors as worry set in.

“You know,” I told her. “When guys let a girl into their gang, there are two ways for her to be initiated.” I pulled the car to a stop in the middle of the woods on the isolated road. “She either gets beat-in.” I shut off the car, killed the lights, and locked eyes with her in the rearview mirror. “Or fucked-in.”

She shook her head. “I want to go home.”

Her voice sounded so fucking pitiful, and she looked like a kid, sinking to the bottom of a river, not wanting death but knowing it was coming.

No, don’t. I don’t want to, I remember myself saying when I was a kid, and I had no power.

But like me, there was nothing Rika could do.

“That’s not one of the choices, Little Monster,” I taunted.

Both Trevor and I turned our heads, starting straight at her.

She lost it, realization dawning. She grabbed the door handle and yanked on it over and over again, frantic to get out.

“We can take what we want from you,” I warned, opening my door. “One after the other, and no one would believe you, Rika.”

I climbed out, moved to her door behind me, and opened it, yanking her out as Will still slept it off in the other back seat.

Slamming the door shut, I pushed her up against it, pressing my body into hers and holding her wrists down at her side.

Was I doing this? For real?

“We’re untouchable,” I told her, looking down at her. “We can do whatever we want.”

She breathed fast, in shallow breaths, squirming against me.

Trevor had gotten out of the car and come around behind me.