by Haley Parker
TORMENT: A DARK ROMANCE (PART ONE)
HALEY PARKER
TORMENT: A DARK ROMANCE
PART ONE
BY HALEY PARKER
Copyright 2019 , all rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced without written consent of the author. This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Author Note
Hailey’s Mailing List
1. 1 - Now
2. 2 - Then
3. 3 - Now
4. 4 - Now
5. 5 - Now
*End Of Part One!
Author Note
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Torment is a dark romance and is intended for mature audiences only. It’s extremely possessive and crude. Please don’t read if strong sexual situations, language, violence, and bullying offend you. All individuals portrayed in this work of fiction are eighteen years of age or older.
Hailey’s Mailing List
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1 - Now
I hurried into the grocery store clutching the list my stepfather had thrust into my fingers twenty minutes ago tightly against my chest. He had given little room for argument; demanding I return within the hour with everything he desired in hand. He had three assistants and a housing staff large enough to fill two moving trucks for purposes like these but handing the task off to one of them would have taken all the fun out of it for him.
He knew what would happen if he sent me out.
He knew what they would do to me.
I glanced over my shoulder in paranoia before sighing in relief when I realized no one was behind me. Always paranoid, Bailey, always worried about the next thing that hadn't even gone wrong yet. But was it really paranoia if it kept happening? I turned back toward the sliding glass doors and pushed through the opening right before it slipped shut. The shoe came out of nowhere and a second later my body was lunging forward and slipping with a loud thud across the clean white floor.
“Fucking piece of shit,” a loud voice snickered and a group of people started laughing loudly in the distance. A deep red fingernail made way into my vision and snatched the list out of my hand. “What do we have here, pathetic little Bailey? A list? Aw, did daddy send you out to get him a few things? Makes sense he would need the help to do his dirty work.”
I pushed myself up off the ground as quickly as I could, trying my best to ignore the glares and stares from the half a dozen other people in the produce department. I held my head high and looked Lex Collins square in the eye of her perfectly made-up face. I had thought when I graduated last year that my problems with her and the rest of the people in my small town would evaporate and everyone would leave me alone. Like everything else I seemed to plan, it hadn’t worked out that way. I couldn’t even step out of my house without someone popping up out of nowhere and reminding me how disgusted they were with the person I was.
“What are you a mute now?” She raised her eyebrows.
One punch. That’s all it would take to make me feel relief. I had never hit someone before but I had dreamt about it enough, hoped that one day I would be able to rip that smug look from her face. The same face that got to participate in a world I would never be a part of.
Don’t react, Bailey.
If you react he will hear about it and that won’t be good for anyone.
Lex narrowed her blue eyes and took a firm step toward me. “No one wants you here, Bailey, we all hate you. You’re a waste of fucking space and the only reason you aren’t dead yet is because Carter and Hunter know that you deserve to live through hell after what you did to their brother.”
I gulped and tried not to show any emotion. What I had done to their brother. The night came pulsating back into my mind in flashes of black and white. It started with the indent of the door into the side of my body followed by the shattering of glass when his large and beautiful frame flew through the windshield. Not to mention the blood, so much damn blood. I closed my eyes and prayed like hell I would never have to see that much blood again. Red used to be my favorite color but I refused to wear anything that even resembled it since that night.
Lex opened up her purse and took out a water bottle. One whiff when she removed the lid told me there was nothing pure about what was inside. She moved the bottle of the top of my head and let some of the alcohol splash onto my shoulders. “You want this, don’t you, Bailey? You need a drink like the fucking alcoholic you are? Just like your real daddy. A no good drunk who was a pathetic waste of space just like his fucking daughter.”
And there it was; the final blow.
I repeated the same montage I always did to myself.
They don’t know you, Bailey.
They think you were drunk, Bailey.
She lost the love of her life.
Try to have sympathy.
I snapped my eyes back open and turned away from her, grabbing a box of strawberries I knew was on my stepfather’s list off a side table before taking off across the building. Suddenly, I felt more desperate than ever to get out of there as soon as possible. If Lex knew I was there it was only a matter of time before Hunter knew it, too. And seeing Hunter Woods was the last thing on earth that I wanted. I had managed to avoid him for two whole weeks, a new record for me, and I had no intention of breaking the streak anytime soon.
I was standing on the edge of my feet, reaching for a can of soup when I was body checked from the back and sent flying into the front of the metal shelf roughly. I cried out in pain and then bit down on my tongue in an effort to control it. Don’t cry, I reminded myself, they love that shit. They get off on it. Large hands flipped my body around and pinned me into the side of the soup aisle, dark blue eyes piercing into me with disgust the same way they always did once Hunter got his hands on me. It was too bad he was such an evil monster since he was the most breath-taking thing I had ever encountered up close in my life.
A chiseled tanned face and a deep arch of his smooth jaw combined with eyes deep enough to melt even the hottest of fires reminded me why he had every woman in our small town lining up to fill his bed on regular bases. His jet-black hair shot up in smooth tassels almost as if he had just woken up. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he growled down at me.
The wind was suddenly knocked completely out of me and I couldn’t have spoken even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t, I definitely didn’t. I heard a scoff from the other side of the aisle and my eyes locked in on Carter Woods, Hunter’s younger brother, and the bane of my existence at school a year ago. No doubt at the commands of his big brother. Hunter was a few years older than us and had graduated the year before. Of course, it didn’t stop him from hanging around and making my life hell. He came from a family that owned half of our town and had bloodlines up and down the coast that ran one of the most powerful real estate businesses in the country. He could have gone anywhere, literally anywhere, and he had still decided to stay in our piece of shit town. A decision I was sure had nothing to do with money and everything to do with making my pay every damn day of my life.
I envied him. Envied the knowledge that he could pick up and leave whenever he wanted to without anyone hunting him down or without having to worry about how he would pay for anything. Hunter’s family was as rich as they came and that made him rich off default. My stepfather might have done well for himself but it was nothing in comparison to the Woods and even if it had been, he had never shared a cent of it with me.
My spine felt like it was made of glass, about
to shatter around the intensity of his presence at any moment. My fists tightened at the side of my body, imagining what it would be like to knee him in the crotch and wipe that smug look off his face just once. But I knew better. Going up against Hunter Woods when he already had the entire town hating me would do nothing except make things worse for me.
Hunter moved in on me again, getting closer than I thought was possible before placing both of his hands on the sides of the shelf in the back of me to box me in. “I was starting to think that you were avoiding me, Bay, hiding out in daddy’s office to avoid having to come face to face with me.” He moved one hand down the side of my body, pausing over the outside of my thigh and squeezing so hard that I cried out in pain. “Does that hurt?” he growled. “Did my brother have the same look on his face when you took him from us?”
I choked at his words, letting the hurt build up in the bottom of my throat. Why did he always have to take it so far? A shudder shot through my stomach as I tried to control all the emotions that were starting to fly to the surface. They were feelings I kept trying to bury, feeling I kept trying to keep as far away from my mind as possible. But Hunter refused to let me grieve, refused to let me move on from the worst night of my life even three years later.
“Hunter,” Lex’s voice broke through our tension. I turned to look at her and took in the warning that was on her face. She didn’t want to hear about that shit any more than I did. She was pleading with him, begging him to not take it to that level. I wasn’t naïve enough to think it had anything to do with wanting to spare me any kind of pain or embarrassment. She didn’t give a fuck if I could handle it or not because she knew that she couldn’t.
I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be her. To have someone love you so much that they completed everything about you -only to have them snatched from your grip and taken from you in a horrific way - before your lives had even really started together. Tell her that I loved her more than I thought I could love anyone. The words came rushing back like a slap in the face and tears welled up behind my eyes right away. It was part of why I hated seeing them so much, besides the obvious reasons, it made me remember him when all I wanted to do was forget him.
Hunter stared at Lex for a few beats before slipping his hand under my throat and yanking my body back so that I was looking him in the eye again. “Don’t you dare fucking cry, you don’t deserve to fucking cry.” He pushed even harder into my skin, releasing me after a few seconds only to look extremely unsatisfied when I started to choke. It wasn’t enough; nothing was ever enough for him. “You’re pathetic,” he seethed at me through clenched teeth. “Why do you think everyone that was supposed to love you left you? Your own mother didn’t even want you.”
Pain filled my heart the same way it always did when they brought my nonexistent family into it. They weren’t wrong. My father had never really been a father at all, more in love with the bottle than me. And my mother had left a few years ago when everything had jumped off. She had never been able to handle other people’s opinions very well. She was held up in some treatment center for stress relief that cost my stepfather thousands of dollars a year and specialized in things like retail therapy and facials.
He’s in agony, Bailey.
You took his brother from him.
“Are you done?” I whispered the words against his lips and flinched when he trailed his nails back and forth over the bare skin that existed between the lining of my yoga pants and the bottom of my black t-shirt. I hated to ask but the thought of my stepfather waiting on me at home was making me more anxious by the second. The last thing I needed was to give him another excuse to be pissed off at me.
Hunter pushed his paws down the front of my body, lowering his beautiful mug with them until he picked up a stray strawberry that had landed somewhere on the floor when he had body checked me moments earlier. The harshness of the contact had sent the carton of fruit flying all over the shiny floor below us in a hundred different directions. When Hunter stood up straight again he was just as close as before, letting his scent linger over my mouth for what felt like hours but was only seconds before he lifted his mouth up in a deep snarl and leaned in so close that a few more millimeters and he would have been kissing me. Before the thought could fully overcome me he pushed the strawberry up to my lips and ran the edge back and forth over my mouth. “Open,” he demanded in a low growl.
Humiliation shot into the core of my stomach. It was just another way for him to prove that he could get me to do anything that he wanted. Another example of how much he owned me and the rest of the damn town. I glanced to the side of my body and took in Carter’s dark glare, eating up every second of my mortifying life. Hunter shot his free hand under my chin and pulled me back against him. “Did I tell you that you could look at my fucking brother, wench?” The same eyes that had been used to drop thousands of women’s panties in the past were reserved with nothing but hate and disdain for me. “We all know what happened the last time you did that, now don’t we?”
I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying. Would I ever feel like I wasn’t on the verge of bursting into tears around them? Probably not. But I knew better than to show any kind of emotion that might make them think I thought I deserved their sympathy.
“Now. Open. Your. Fucking. Mouth.” Hunter pronounced each word slowly like I was too much of an idiot to understand a full sentence. He smirked in disgust when my lips pulled apart slowly and shoved the red juiciness into my teeth. “Don’t chew it,” he ordered before closing the folds of my chapped edges around the top. He leaned into me, resting his most personal areas against mine; his most used areas against my least used areas. The few suitors I had lined up at my front door had disappeared the second I had stepped out of that car with the town’s golden boy dead inside of the passenger seat. Within a fraction of a second Hunter had his jaws locked into the other side of the strawberry, his breath steady across from me when mine was picking up more and more by the second.
My whole body felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or from the hotness that Hunter always brought out of me whenever he was close by. As sick as it was, as cruel as he meant for his touch to be, he was still the only man who had wrapped his arms around me in years. I longed to be held more than he knew and my body reacted to his touch as if it was meant for pleasure instead of pain. My eyelids started to flicker closed without my permission and for a short amount of time I allowed myself to get wrapped up in how good his body felt against me - I allowed myself to pretend that he wanted to be close to me under different circumstances - circumstances that would involve moaning instead of crying and begging for more instead of begging for mercy. When I felt his perfectly crafted body tense against me I forced my eyes open, worried that he had somehow managed to read the dirty forbidden thoughts that had subconsciously made their way into my mind.
When I managed to focus again Hunter was done looking at me, dropping the strawberry before leaning forward and sniffing the edge of my shirt. He flared his nostrils. “You reek of fucking alcohol.” He tensed even harder, his jaw ticking in anger. “It’s twelve in the fucking morning, Bailey, you’ll never fucking learn will you?”
I shot a glance over at Lex, pleading with her to tell Hunter and Carter about the vodka she had poured onto my body only moments earlier. I knew it was a lost cause even before she smirked and shot me a satisfied look. “I-I didn’t,” I told Hunter, looking back at him. “Something spilled on my shirt before I left the house.” I knew better than to try to blame any of them for anything, especially when that someone was Lex. If they were protective of anyone it was their honorary sister.
“You’re a liar,” he declared before glancing at his brother. “Give me something,” he told him, using his knee to hold the bottom half of my body firmly into place. “Something to teach her a lesson.”
My stomach sank. “Hunter,” I pleaded.
“What do you want?” Carter challenged with a chuckle. He cross
ed his arms across his chest and searched my eyes for any kind of reaction. “You look terrified, Bailey,” he informed me, obviously pleased. “You aren’t going to shit your pants, are you? I’m sure your step-daddy would clean you up.”
Lex laughed and the high-pitched sound pinched my ears.
Hunter glanced up and down the aisle before finally narrowing in on something and smiling in triumph. “There,” he ordered his little brother. Carter laughed and grabbed something off the shelf before ripping it out of the package and thrusting it into his brother’s hands. The last thing I saw before Hunter grabbed the end of my dark hair was the sharpness of a metal blade. “Time for a haircut, wench.”
2 - Then
I slammed the door to my locker shut and hugged my books tightly across my chest while I waited for the tornado I knew was about to blow through at any second. It happened at the same time every morning and for a few mind-blowing seconds, I felt like the world was standing still underneath me. The Woods were the closest things to royalty that our school had and their arrival every morning was like watching a group of kings greet their peasants.
And it may as well have been.
“Did I miss it?” Alyssa asked, sliding her small frame into the open space next to me and pushing her black frames up higher onto the edge of her nose. “Tell me I didn’t miss it,” she pleaded when I didn’t answer right away.
“Relax,” I sighed. “You didn’t miss it.” I would have glanced over at her in reassurance but one flash away from the double doors at the end of the hall and I could have missed them. Alyssa was my lab partner and one of the few people I considered a friend in the so-called school my mother had moved me into when she decided to marry the first jerk with a deep checkbook the year before.
