by Soto, S. M.
Bodies drop, thudding onto the carpet, and when I see pools of blood, I let out another scream, then push to my feet and run. I don’t make it far—a hand is suddenly wound in my hair and someone yanks on the strands. For a second, I think it’s Percivale, but when I’m pulled against someone and a knife is held against my throat, I realize it’s not.
The gunshots suddenly cease, and when I’m yanked around, the knife still securely at my throat, I spot Percivale. His crisp white T-shirt is no longer white. Now, it’s drenched in blood. My stomach bottoms out, and the sound of my heart beating roars in my ears. The man holding the knife tightens his grip as he addresses Percivale.
“We found you. Only, we didn’t realize you were carrying such precious cargo. What a shame.”
All the blood drains from my face at his Irish accent.
Who are these guys?
A tear glides down my cheek as I watch the struggle Percivale wages. For a split second, I think he’s actually going to let the man kill me. I see it in the resolution in his eyes. In the way he stares at me and the knife, but just as the man behind me starts digging the blade into my skin, Percivale raises his gun and fires off a bullet into his skull. The bullet is so close to me, I hear it whiz past me. The grip on me falls away, and I drop to my knees, the floodgates setting me free. My heart is pounding, and my stomach is churning, like I’m going to be sick.
I keep replaying the look in his eyes as he gripped his gun at his side. I could see, clear as day, that part of him wanted that man to kill me. A wet sensation glides down my neck, and when I bring my hand up, I realize I’m bleeding. The man still managed to nick me with his knife.
I glare up at Percivale, who’s staring down at me, face void of any expression, watching me.
“How dare you! You were just going to let him kill me, weren’t you?”
When he doesn’t say anything, I push off the floor and charge him. I bang against his chest with my fists, taking my anger and my fear out on him.
“You spineless bastard! How could you hesitate?”
Percivale catches my wrists, glaring down at me now. “You’re alive, aren’t you, princess?”
“Stop calling me that!” I scream, tears streaming down my face. “I’m not a princess! You have no clue what I’ve been through! You know nothing about my life.”
The smirk that pulls across his face is cold and deadly. “I know enough, princess. Now shut the fuck up.”
With deft movements, he releases the cuff from my ankle and turns on his heel, yanking me after him. I try to avoid all the dead bodies that litter the floor. One splayed across the bed. Another on the table. The other two near the door that’s blown to crap.
When Percivale shoves me into the car and goes back inside to grab his duffel and whatever else, I don’t even blink. I feel my body going into shock. I’ve never seen so much blood and gore, so many dead bodies. I keep replaying the lifeless looks in their eyes. The way he hesitated. The darkness swirling in his eyes. Five men against one.
How are we even alive?
I don’t ask questions when he pulls into the parking lot of another cheap motel. I don’t even fight him when he orders me to stay put. Once we’re inside another motel room that’s just as bad as the last, none of it hits me until I’m showering and dried blood swirls down the drain. My eyes slam shut as I replay the knocking. The movement in the room next door.
Were they already there waiting?
Was this my fault?
For the first time since witnessing all the deaths of the day, I crumble into a sobbing mess.
The Actions of a Monster
Blossom
Over the next two days, things between Percivale and me don’t get any better. In fact, they only get worse. Every morning when I get up, he’s already gone, but there’s a bag of food sitting on the table for me along with a coffee and those little disposable cups of creamer.
He leaves me little random things to snack on during the day, like chips, cookies, etc. But after the first day, I learned I needed to be smart because by the time he came for dinner, it was already late, close to 9:00 p.m.
I tell myself if I wasn’t chained to this bed too, I would’ve already run. But the way my brain has been running these last few days, I can’t even tell if that’s the truth anymore.
Percivale would eat with me and dig through that damn black duffel bag that I now knew contained a laptop, which could be used to get help, and weapons I could use against him if I had the guts, and then he’d slip out again. All of this without so much as ten words. He was giving me the cold shoulder, and I didn’t understand why. Each night, he wouldn’t make it back until early morning, usually 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.
I was still angry at him. For putting me in this predicament, for hesitating when that man tried to kill me. Apparently, he was still angry with me too because he hadn’t forgotten my harsh words back at the hotel. The lies I let slip from my lips, about not wanting his touch.
By the fourth night, I’m past my wits’ end, tired of being trapped in this room and ignored by this man. I’ve had it. This time, when night fell and he skipped dinner, leaving me fucking starving again, I was boiling. I grabbed that damn ugly retro lamp and threw it at the wall and watched in horror as the fucking thing bounced right off the wall and hit the floor, not even shattering like I’d hoped. So I picked it up and tried four more times—four—until I heard the satisfying sound of glass shattering.
I mean, who the hell does he think he is? He thinks he can leave me here and I’ll continue being docile while he’s out doing god knows what while I starve? No way in hell am I leaving my fate in his hands anymore. I am so fucking done with this bullshit.
Hours later, when Percivale finally makes it back, I don’t lie in bed silently, curled in a ball like I have been the last few days. No. The second I hear an engine outside and the sound of tires crunching over gravel, I push up from the bed and pace, waiting for the door to open. When it does, Percivale pauses over the threshold when he notices the lights are on and I’m not in bed. His gaze roves over me, then drifts down to the shattered glass of the lamp on the floor. His lips thin into a grim line.
“How dare you,” I grind out. “How dare you leave me in here to rot for three fucking days! What is wrong with you?” My voice grows louder and louder until it’s borderline hysterical. I yank at my hair like a woman on the verge of insanity.
Percivale doesn’t apologize. The bastard doesn’t even look at me. All he does is puff on his stupid fucking cigarette, discards that stupid fucking duffel bag, and then walks away.
Once he starts stripping off his jacket and his shirt, I. See. Fucking. Red.
There’s no mistaking the sweet scent of perfume on his clothes or when he rips his shirt off, heading toward the bathroom, the nail marks raked down his back in red streaks. My heart squeezes and anger boils in my veins. I have no right to be mad. I shouldn’t even care that he’s choosing to keep his hands to himself and fuck someone else instead of me, but I do. I’m fucking furious.
Without thinking about it, I jolt into action, stomping after him. I let out a growl of anger as I beat my fists against him and call him every horrible name in the book I can think of.
“How dare you leave me here by my fucking self, while you’re out sticking your dick in god knows who! You’re disgusting. I hate you. Do you understand that? I fucking hate you!” I scream at him. He whirls on me, and I beat my fists against his chest and manage to clock him in the face a few times. He snatches my wrist and squeezes, almost to the point of pain.
“Knock it off,” he seethes, eyes wild with rage.
“You’re a low-life piece of shit,” I yell in his face, trying to really get under his skin. It doesn’t have the desired effect; instead, he laughs, like this whole display of emotion is amusing to him, and the sound rains nails down my back.
“Never pretended to be anything else, sweetheart.”
I buck against him with a renewed sense of anger,
trying to slip out of his unrelenting hold. The marks on his skin have me imagining him with another woman, and it hurts. I hate that it hurts. I hate that I fucking care, but I do. When I struggle against him and he still doesn’t let go, I bare my claws and scratch him on his face.
“How dare you fuck another woman and leave me here!” I spit a wad of saliva at him, and he freezes.
So do I.
Suddenly, we both come to a standstill, and everything I’ve been stewing over all day seems inconsequential as I realize I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.
I stop breathing and shrink away from the look in Percivale’s eyes. It’s bone-chilling.
Oh god. What have I done?
I’ve taken it too far.
He stares down at me with a murderous rage in his eyes. I’ve seen him angry before. But not like this. Never like this.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, my eyes going wide. “I-I…I didn’t—”
His hold on my wrists tighten, and he backs me into the wall, pressing his body against mine. His hand suddenly wraps around my throat, and he squeezes. My eyes bulge, and I futilely try to pry his fingers off and suck in gasps of air, but it’s useless.
“What’s got you so angry, kitten? The thought of my dick fucking someone else other than you?”
He knows. Damnit, he knows.
I hate him.
“Stop it,” I choke out, my face bulging with the loss of blood flow.
“This is what you want, isn’t it? You want it to be you? You want to be the one I’m fucking, Blossom?”
Before I can answer, he whirls me around by my throat and tosses me down, face-first on the bed. Fear squeezes my chest, and I try to scramble away from him, but he locks my arms behind my back and roughly spreads my legs.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Blossom? For me to fuck you?”
He rubs his hardness against my backside, and I try to buck him off because even though I want him, I don’t want it like this. Never like this. His tone is scary. He’s scaring me.
He grips a fistful of my hair and yanks my head back toward him. My roots scream in pain, and so do I.
“Let me tell you something, sweetheart. That love that you’re so desperately searching for? You ain’t gonna find it with me. My love is cruel—deadly. I don’t fuck sweet and nice. I like it fast and hard. And if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll fucking get,” he seethes in my ear. My chest cracks open, and I sob into the sheets. Percivale roughly starts to yank down my bottoms and my underwear. His hands painfully dig into me, purposely bruising me. The hysteria really starts to claw up my throat when I feel him fiddling with his jeans behind me.
“Please. Don’t do this. Not like this. Please!” I scream, the sheets muffling my voice.
He finally freezes. Slowly, his hold on me loosens, and then his touch and his body are gone. I stay on the bed, ass in the air, with my bottoms still hanging down to my knees, my face shoved in the sheets while I cry. Pain slices through my chest, and I curl my body into a ball, trying to push the awful memories away.
Of Ryan.
Of prom night.
Of my head shoved into the sheets of the hotel room while he slammed into me over and over again, even though I begged him not to.
Even though I sobbed and fought him every step of the way, he didn’t stop.
The sound of the bathroom door slamming closed only makes me cry harder. There’s a deafening bang, and I can only imagine Percivale has just punched something in his rage. It only causes the tears to come faster. I don’t even try to leave. To escape. I just stay curled on the bed and cry.
By the time Percivale comes out of the bathroom, I’m already under the covers, staring blankly at the wall, my back to his side of the bed. I’m all the way on the edge, just like I was when we first started sharing a bed.
I feel him slide in beside me, his body still as stone. A while passes between us in complete silence, and I listen to his breaths, noticing there still isn’t an even rhythm which means he hasn’t fallen asleep yet either. I suddenly roll onto my back, mirroring his position and stare up at the ceiling, rubbing my lips together in contemplation.
My throat constricts as the words materialize on my lips, like they want to hold the secret in forever, but I can’t. I don’t want to. Not after tonight.
“I was raped.”
I feel his body stiffen next to me, and it prompts me to turn onto my side to look at him. To see whatever he’s thinking. His face is shrouded in darkness, but I can see the grimace. I can see how much he doesn’t like what I’ve just said. He looks like he’s struggling with something, with some inner demons. When he turns his face toward me, I see the pain written all over his face, and what’s more astonishing is the regret I see in his eyes. My eyes linger on the scratches that decorate his cheek, the ones that I caused, and my chest tightens.
I suddenly feel the need to make him feel better so he doesn’t blame himself. So I keep going to get it off my chest.
“It happened a long time ago,” I say and clear my throat. “Prom night to be exact. My date was a football jock, and I was just a stupid girl who thought he might really like me. I had a crush on him for years, so when he said he got us a room, I thought we would just fool around, and he’d ask me to be his girlfriend and we’d have that cute high school relationship that every girl dreams of. But that wasn’t what happened. That wasn’t what Ryan wanted from me at all.
“Over the course of the night, he kept handing me drink after drink, kissing me when I wanted to talk. Touching me in all the wrong places when all I wanted to do was be held.”
Tears spring to my eyes as I think about what comes next. My bottom lip trembles with emotion as I replay that night. It’s always there in the back of mind, on a sadistic loop.
“Then, when I least expected it, his kisses were no longer soft or sexy, but hard and forceful. He wasn’t just petting or groping anymore but squeezing and hurting me. Then, as if me telling him no more wasn’t enough, he held me down, shoved my face into the bed, even when I begged him not to. He took everything from me that night, and the worst part? The next day, he made it seem like I wanted it. He bragged to everyone about our night together. No one would ever believe he raped me. Why would they? I naively went to his hotel room on prom night thinking this was the start of us, when all he wanted was to screw me. Whether I said yes or no wasn’t even a factor for him.”
Percivale’s face is clouded with rage, so much freaking rage it has me wanting to reach out to him, but before I can, he suddenly shoots upright in bed and tries to hop out, but I grab his arm. My fingers curl around him, and I squeeze, holding him in his place. His eyes slowly drift to mine, and when our gazes clash, something passes through us, each of us. I can feel it—practically taste it.
“Please don’t go. Not tonight,” I whisper.
He turns around slowly, giving me all of him, and I see the internal war he’s waging within himself. I tug on his arm the tiniest bit, driving my point home, and finally, he lowers himself back down, lying beside me, staring at me. His eyes roam all over my face like he’s committing every piece of me to memory. It warms my heart.
“After Ryan, I stayed away from guys. I tried the college thing, got a degree in marketing and business, then decided to open up my bakery. That happened eight years ago, and sometimes it still feels like it was yesterday. I can still smell him and his cologne. I can hear him behind me. Feel his weight on me. I haven’t felt secure with a man in eight years because of him. And I hate him for it. For taking away something from me.”
“I’m going to kill him.” Percivale’s voice is set in stone. It’s hard and unrelenting and gives me pause. Because I know without a shadow of a doubt, it’s true. If Percivale finds out who he is, he’ll kill him.
“It’s taken me years to get over my anger, to forgive him, but there’s still a part of me that hates the thought of being with a man again. For fear of what happened all those years ag
o.”
Something flashes over his face. He looks…incredulous. “How can you forgive him? After he did that to you?” he asks, like he truly can’t understand why, so I shrug.
“Because all that hate will just eat away at my soul, and I don’t want that, Percivale. I want to be happy, not weighted down by a past I can’t change.”
Percivale clenches his eyes shut, like he’s in pain. “I’m…sorry.”
I try to mask my shock. It isn’t hard to do when he refuses to look at me. I use this opportunity to reach my hand toward his face. My fingers lightly caress the wounds I caused, and my face falls.
“I’m so sorry. For doing that.” I’m starting to get choked up, and he can hear it. His eyes spring open, and much to my surprise, his hand covers mine, tracing over my skin.
“Don’t,” he says, voice thick and husky. I search his eyes, getting lost in the turbulent depths. In him—every dark piece of him. Something releases in my chest at his next words. That tightness there is no longer so difficult to breathe through. “I didn’t sleep with anyone.”
And before I can think better of it, I lean forward and press my lips against his. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even allow himself the luxury of falling into the kiss, especially not after what I’ve just shared with him. So I use this time to explore. I press my lips over his softly, enjoying how plump and firm his are. A thrill shoots down my spine, urging me on, so I deepen the kiss, tracing the seam with my tongue.
I slide my body closer, pressing my front to his, and I slide my hand around his neck, trying to pull his lips toward me and get him to react, but he doesn’t. He won’t.
