The Bastard Prince (Crellids Book 1)

by Chloe Walsh

  "Do it!" he commanded, shoving my hand between my legs. "Piss!"

  Trembling, I forced myself to pee and then held the stick out to him.

  Without hesitation, Trig snatched it out of my hand and paced the bathroom, never once taking his eyes off the tiny screen on the stick.

  Seconds ticked by, turning into minutes, until Trig finally stopped pacing.

  "Congratulations," he said in a deathly cold voice. "You fucked us both."

  "I didn’t do it on my own," I strangled out, feeling weak as awareness smacked me straight in the face. "Wait – I'm really pregnant?"

  "Not for long," he assured me, tone hard and unyielding. "I will make arrangements."

  "But you can't," I gasped. "What about your god?"

  "My god will understand," he snapped, tossing the stick in the sink. "Do not get your hopes up on this," he added, giving me a warning look. "It is not something that will happen for us right now."

  "But it's already here," I whispered, lip wobbling. "I can't get rid of our baby."

  "I will get you a bird," he relented, voice thick with emotion. "I will get you a house full of birds. I will get you whatever your heart desires, but I cannot give you that." He pointed to my stomach and a huge tremor racked through him. "I will not give that monster an heir conceived through initiation."

  "But you're an heir," I strangled out, tears trickling down my cheeks. "You were conceived through initiation, too–"

  "Exactly," Trig choked out, voice cracking. "And look what happened to the woman who birthed me! Look what they did to her! Look what they did to me! To you because you dared to love me!" He shook his head. "No."

  "Trig!"

  "I will not watch history repeat itself, corderito," he bit out, tone leaving no room for argument. "If you knew what this truly was – a sentence far worse than death – then you would not be crying. I will make you an appointment somewhere, or I will have someone come here to take care of this." He shook his head and expelled a pained breath. "I will keep you alive and safe." His shoulders stiffened when a sob tore through me. "I will give you babies further down the line, if a family is truly what you wish and long for. In a few years, when my father is burning in hell, I will fill you with my babies, but you cannot have that one. I will not allow it. It's too dangerous."

  Clenching my eyes shut, I dropped my head in my hands and gripped my hair. "How can you say that?"

  "Because I understand what that thing's life will amount to and you do not. You want me to father a child? You want to bring another bastard into this world?" He shook his head in disbelief. "You are possessed by madness, corderito. I cannot allow this to happen. In time, I will give you all of the children you desire."

  "I don’t want all of the children," I spat. "I want the one growing inside of me."

  "Impossible."

  "Well, I'm not doing it," I warned, meeting his glare with one of mine. "You can't make me."

  Emotions masked, Trig closed the space between us.

  "Oh, corderito." Crouching down in front of me, he took my chin in his hands. "Of course I can make you. And you will do as I say." Trailing his thumb over my bottom lip, he tugged on my chin, yanking my face towards him. "Because if you push me on this, I will tie you down and cut it out of you with my own bare hands."

  "No." A pained sob choked out of me and Trig released my face. "You can't make me do this."

  "It is happening," he declared, giving me his back as he stalked for the door. "Do not get attached."

  "I fucking hate you!" I screamed after him.

  "Throw your tantrums, corderito, but it will not change the outcome," was all he replied before the door clicked shut behind him.

  20

  Sitting on the edge of the bath tub, I dipped my toes in the warm water, watching as the bubbles clung to my calves. I’d taken a ridiculous number of baths in this very tub since my return, for no other reason than it was something to do.

  And god knows, I needed something to occupy my time while I waited.

  Waited for Fabio to attack again.

  Waited for Trigger to return and take my baby from me.

  Shivering, I braced myself, gripped the porcelain rim, and slowly lowered myself into the water, wincing when it touched my spine.

  My welts were still painful, although not nearly as excruciating as they had been.

  Biting down so hard on my lip that I could feel the familiar taste of metallic copper on my tongue, I slowly positioned myself in the center of the large, oval tub and hooked my arms around my bunched-up knees.

  I had a lot of time to think, to clear my head and make sense of my surroundings.

  Now that I wasn't under constant threat of rape or death, and was actually getting decent sleep at night, I found myself slowly piecing my thoughts back together.

  I felt myself steadying the ship that was my mental wellness.

  A little more clear-headed than before, I found myself plotting.

  Plotting and planning and scheming was a favorite pastime of mine.

  Before, I wasted my days plotting vengeance on Fabio.

  Now, I spent every second of my days plotting and planning the future of the baby in my womb.

  In three days, Trigger would return home from his latest excursion. That meant I had three days to figure out how to change his mind.

  Exhaling heavily, I turned my face to one side and rested my cheek on my knees, trying not to think too much about something I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep, but desperately wanted to.

  I knew full well that if I let myself fall in love with this baby and Trigger took it away from me, I would never be able to recover mentally.

  So I broke my thoughts down to small, bite-sized pieces and kept my mind focused on the only part of this pregnancy I dared to think about.

  Changing Trig’s mind.

  If I couldn’t, then I would have to kill him.

  It was that simple.

  When I felt myself begin to panic at the thought of losing either Trigger or the baby, I forced my mind to go completely blank.

  I need to not lose the small amount of sanity I had reclaimed.

  "What do you think, Peter?" I asked, eyes locked on the beautiful African Grey Parrot lounging in a cage next to the tub. I had found him next to my bed the morning after Trigger told me that I had to have an abortion. "Is Trig a cocksucker?"

  "Cocksucker," Peter dutifully squawked back. "Fuckin' cocksucker. Cocksuckin' Trig!"

  Grinning, I pressed my face against my knees and giggled. "You're right. He's a bad wolf."

  "Bad cocksuckin' fuckin' wolf," he squawked back, swinging on his little swing set. "Fuckin' Trig."

  "He's not so bad," I confessed. "Usually. But he's forgotten who he is." Sighing heavily, I reached up and wiped my face, enjoying the heat from my hands. "He's scared."

  "Scaredy wolf, scaredy wolf," Peter parroted.

  "God, I love you," I chuckled, feeling my smile stretch my cheeks.

  "Forgive me," Peter squawked then. "Please. Please. Cocksuckin' Trig."

  The smile fell from my face.

  Yeah, I really needed to stop confiding in the bird.

  Regretting telling Peter every last one of my secrets, I closed my eyes and let my mind wander past the baby growing inside me, delving into the deepest, saddest moments of my life.

  Like always, my memories took me straight back to that night two years ago.

  The beginning of my end.

  God, it was like no other pain I'd ever experienced in my life.

  Worse than that night in his father's lair.

  Worse than how it felt when my father died.

  That night was the night I realized that the human heart didn’t house the human emotions because it could have never continued to beat if it truly endured what I had in that moment. Our feelings were tucked away somewhere much deeper. Somewhere where no physical element or force could touch them.

  I guess that was why they were so hard to heal.<
br />
  Shivering, I pushed past the revulsion, terror, and heartache, and forced myself to remember that night – or at least, what I dared to remember...

  Naked as the day I was born, Trigger dragged me from the room by my hair.

  I was so frightened by his outburst that I didn’t dare try to stop him.

  For the first time in my life, I genuinely feared the man I loved more than life itself.

  On my hands and knees, I scrambled after him, hissing out in pain when he yanked on my hair with ruthless force.

  "Trig, please! You're hurting me –"

  "Do not speak to me," he sneered, marching me through the entryway of the estate and across the cobbled courtyard until he reached his car.

  Releasing my hair, he yanked the passenger door open and pointed a trembling finger at the seat. "Get the fuck in before I change my mind and kill you now!"

  Terrified, I forced my limbs to unlock from their submissive position and crawled into the seat, body racking with violent tremors.

  "Trig, I swear, I didn’t do anything –"

  "Shut the fuck up!" he roared, climbing into the driver's seat beside me. "Just –" A pained snarl tore from his throat and he lunged for me, gripping my jaw painfully tight. "Puta," he spat, glaring into my eyes with such hatred that I wilted away from him. "Puta traidora!"

  "I'm not a whore," I whimpered, flinching in pain. "I didn't –"

  "Do not speak," he snarled, roughly shoving my face away and starting the engine. "You make me sick."

  "I've been framed –"

  My words broke off when the back of his hand smacked me hard across the face.

  "Speak again and I will cut your tongue off!" he roared, visibly shaking with unrestrained fury. "Crellid whore!"

  Stunned, I sagged against my door and cupped my cheek.

  My eyes filled with tears as the reality of what had happened sunk in.

  Trig hit me.

  He fucking hit me.

  It wasn't a game.

  It wasn't a joke.

  He honest to god lashed out with force, intending to inflict physical pain on me.

  As awareness swept through me, I felt something inside of me float away.

  My faith.

  He didn’t speak another word – well, none that I understood – and neither did I.

  Wherever he was taking me, I didn’t care.

  I was breaking inside.

  Raised and then ravaged by wolves.

  Numb, I sat motionless beside him while I waited for him to decide my fate.

  It wasn’t until the bright orange, pillowing flames illuminating the night sky came into sight that I jerked out of my mournful solitude.

  "Oh my god," I gasped, hand moving to cup my mouth when my brain made sense of what my eyes were seeing. "That's the –"

  "Church," Trig filled in for me, tone laced with venom. "Sí."

  Pulling to an abrupt stop, he cut the engine and shoved his door open.

  My mouth was still hanging open, eyes glistening with tears, when Trigger rounded the car and opened my door.

  Yanking me out by the arm, he marched me straight towards the burning church.

  "What happened?" I cried. My stomach lurched when my eyes landed on the dozen or so burnt corpses laid out on the ground. "Oh my god –"

  "You," he snarled, swinging me around to clutch my throat. "You happened." He squeezed so tightly he cut off my air supply. "You killed them." He increased the pressure on my throat. "Fucking whore."

  With a sneer, he roughly shoved me to the ground.

  Landing on my hands and knees amongst the bodies, I gasped for air but the smell, the god-awful stench of singed hair and flesh, filled my senses.

  Unable to stop myself, I threw up.

  "Breathe it in," Trig ordered, coming to stand behind me. "Open your fucking eyes and breathe in their death." Cupping the back of my head, he forced my face into the dirt and ashes, giving me no option but to breathe in the smell of death. "Look at what you did."

  "I didn’t tell –"

  "Do not lie!" he bellowed and I cowered away from his closed fist, curling up in the smallest ball I could amongst the dead. "You are to blame." Unclenching his fist, he ran his hand through his hair and took several steps back. "You betrayed me!"

  I shook my head, stunned. "H-how?"

  "How?" he repeated, livid. "How!" He laughed humorlessly and pulled his gun from the holster at his side. "You told them about this place!” Aiming the gun right at me, he closed the space between us and hissed, "You fucking told them and they mutilated her!"

  "Trig –"

  "They raped her," he continued, pushing the barrel of the gun into my flesh. "At the altar of my God! And those nuns –" His voice broke off and he quickly strode around in circles, delirious with rage and grief. "What they did to those poor women –"

  Shaking his head, he used his forearm to wipe a rogue tear from his cheek before turning back to me, expression cold.

  "You cost me everything." Gun aimed at my head once more, he marched towards me. "You fucking whore!"

  With his free hand, he yanked me to my feet only to push me up against a nearby tree.

  "Please, Trig, I didn’t –"

  "Why?" The question was torn from his chest. "Did I not treat you with respect?" Tears flew freely down his cheeks now. "Did I not worship you? Did I not love you enough?"

  "Yes. Of course you did –"

  "Was it all a game to you?" A pained sound tore from deep inside of him. "Were you playing me for all these years?"

  "No, Trig, I swear –" I began to say, but he cut me off by squeezing my throat with his free hand, once again cutting off my precious supply of oxygen.

  "Run, little lamb, and run quickly."

  Clutching my throat tighter, he leaned close and pressed a hard kiss to my forehead before quickly pulling back.

  "Find a very good place to hide from your wolf and stay hidden." Chest heaving, he shoved the barrel of the gun against my forehead, right between my eyes, and whispered, "Don’t look back. Don’t even dare to breathe too loudly. Because the next time we meet, when I find you again, I will kill you…"

  His English improved, I thought dejectedly, forcing my mind back to the present. Wherever Trig had gone for the last two years, it had been somewhere where he'd learned the language far better than I'd ever taught him.

  Inhaling and then slowly exhaling several calming breaths, I coaxed my heart back to a somewhat steady rhythm.

  Only when the water in the faucet ran cold and my tears dried up did I climb out of the tub.

  Ignoring a towel, I dried my feet on the luscious bath mat, slipped on a bathrobe, and moved straight for my bird.

  Peter the second.

  Petey bird, 2.0.

  A gift from Trig.

  He was still in there.

  Somewhere...

  I hadn't seen him since the morning after the doctor's visit. He was avoiding the house, and avoiding me like the plague while he attended to so-called business, but that didn't mean that I had stopped thinking about him.

  He was on my mind constantly.

  We needed to talk and he needed to do what I wanted.

  Wheeling Peter's huge cage back into my bedroom, I set him up next to the window, just how he liked it, and spent an ornate amount of time just looking at him.

  A soft knock on my bedroom door had me swinging around just in time to find the small red-head in the doorway.

  Another gift from Trig.

  "He's back," Tanya announced from my bedroom doorway.

  My heart jack-knifed in my chest. "Trig?"

  She nodded. "Uh-huh. Scowling like a beast. He's downstairs right now."

  "He's early," I blurted out, panic rising up inside of me. "I was to have three more days –"

  "He's alone," she hurried to say. "So don't worry too much. Whatever he has decided to do will not be happening tonight."

  Meaning he didn’t bring a doctor here to cut it out of me,
like he had promised.

  "What should I do?" I heard myself ask the tiny, newly-retired whore, surprising myself with how quickly I had taken to her.

  I never had a friend besides Trig and Jet before, and never, ever a girl.

  When I found Tanya sitting at the foot of my bed the morning after Peter arrived, I'd been stunned. I wasn't sure if I'd been serious when I asked Trig for the whore. But he took me seriously and either bought her or stole her from the Crellid Estate.

  I suspected the latter.

  She seemed elated to be here, desperate to please, and I was grateful for the company. As long as she kept her eyes and mouth off my prince, we would get along just fine.

  "How do I stop this?" I added, knowing that I didn't need to evaluate further. Like the weakling I was, I'd told the whore about the baby. Don't ask me why, but loneliness and isolation were wreaking havoc on my mind.

  I think telling her was my attempt at keeping myself grounded and in the present. Besides, she'd shown me kindness in the whorehouse. I wouldn't forget that.

  "No knives," Tanya warned, eyeing me warily. "Or guns."

  I pouted. "I wasn't going to stab him."

  She arched a brow. "Weren't you?"

  I huffed out a breath. "Fine," I relented. "I might have, but only if I didn't get my way."

  "That's a child's way of thinking," she said, stepping into my room. "You are not a child, Ashton."

  "I'm not?"

  "No." Shaking her head, she smiled. "You are a woman."

  "I know that," I squeezed out. "I just..." I shrugged. "We kind of lose it with each other easily."

  Her grin widened. "Perfect. Make him lose it first."

  "I can do that," I agreed and then whispered, "But how?"

  Tanya's eyes gleamed with mischief. "By thinking like a woman."

  "Has this ever happened to you, Tanya?" I asked quietly.

  "What? Having a hot-as-fuck don worship the ground I walk on?" She arched a brow. "What do you think?"

  "No." I grimaced. "I meant have you ever loved someone so much that you literally have no control over your own thoughts?"

  She smirked. "So, you do love him?"

  I scrunched my nose up. "Nope."

  She rolled her eyes. "Just go downstairs and fuck his brains out. Men are always far more compliable when their balls are empty."