“Why can’t you just walk away and leave me to my own damn life? I didn’t ask to be saved.” She frowns and looks away.
I don’t know if she’s referring to years ago when Cerberus pulled her out of Hell in Venezuela, or when Briar and I caught her in that frat house with four men looming over her.
“You’re not just hurting yourself.” I feel like I’m arguing with a toddler over the negative health benefits of sticking a fucking fork in the electrical socket. Just like a three-year-old, she can’t see the dangers in what she’s doing because the thrill is all she’s focusing on.
She huffs, her head turning until her empty green eyes look back up at me. “No one gives a shit about me.”
“That’s not true.” My mouth is suddenly dry, but I do my best to keep my posture stiff and unassuming. I can’t confess my feelings to her when I don’t understand them myself.
She somehow understands the battle I’m fighting inside as evident by the sudden glint of deviousness in her eyes.
“I don’t give a shit about a single person on this earth, myself included.” Her tongue snakes out and licks at her lower lip as her eyes narrow in challenge. She’s purposely exploiting the emotion she can read but I’m unable to express, and her words cut me deep.
Does she want me to hurt her? Is she trying to prove that no one will tolerate the nastiness coming from her beautiful mouth?
“Let me go.” She sounds almost feral, but isn’t a cage where wild animals belong?
“I can’t do that.” Her eyes dart to my hand when I pull my knife out. The snap of the blade locking into place when I flip it open echoes around the room.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Why are you afraid? Wouldn’t this be easier than slowly dying or being brutalized over and over at those damn parties?”
Heat and arousal wash over her as her eyes stay trained on the shiny blade. God she’s fucking perfect, but her being turned on right now isn’t what either one of us need. It only feeds exactly what she’s after.
“I hate you,” she seethes, no doubt a means to propel me into action. She wants me to hurt her. She wants me to get her off. She needs both, but that isn’t on the calendar of events right now.
“Do you have any idea what it does to me each and every time you show up at one of those parties?” I take a step closer. “Any clue how it makes me feel?”
I take one more step. Standing right in front of her, I shrug out of my t-shirt. I didn’t bother to put my cut on since Lynch was up my ass.
“It feels like this.”
Without hesitation, I slash my knife across my stomach.
The pain is fucking orgasmic, but it’s her wide eyes and mouth hanging open that makes me almost come in my jeans.Chapter 27Kaci
“No!” I reach for him as blood blooms on his skin, but the grid of the cage isn’t large enough for me to get my entire hand through. “What are you doing?”
“I’m a psychopath. Why do you care?” His knife draws across his skin again, and both wounds seep blood down his abdomen.
“Stop!” Tears are burning my eyes. “You yawned too!”
Confusion marks his brow just as he’s lifting his knife to cut himself again. “What?”
“A few weeks back at my apartment. I yawned and you yawned too. Psychopaths don’t yawn empathetically.”
I’m sobbing when he cuts himself again.
“You really need to stop getting your info from binge-watching Netflix.”
“Please stop,” I manage through my tears.
“Why?” TJ dips the tip of his knife into the blood on his stomach and draws on his skin with it. “This is what it feels like on the inside when you put yourself in danger. You hate me. I just thought you should know what you do to me.”
“Don’t!” I yell again when he runs the knife twice more over his stomach. The blood is too thick, making the number of wounds hard to distinguish.
“I don’t like bleeding on the inside, Kaci. So I’ll bleed on the outside for you.”
He’s right. He has to be a fucking psycho, but that doesn’t stop the tears from falling or my gut from clinching with the way he’s looking at me right now. He’s begging me with his eyes, telling me I’m the only one who can stop the pain.
“TJ!” His knife stills midway through another cut. “Hurt me. Hurt me instead.”
His head shakes as a tear forms in the corner of his right eye. “I need this. It’s the only thing that keeps me whole on the inside.”
It isn’t until I really look at him and let his words sink in that I see the hundreds of razor thin marks all down his arms and across his pecs. They seem to glow under the single light hanging from the ceiling. I have no idea how I missed them before.