Chapter 21
I clawedat him when he dragged me into the car, my nails grazing along the flesh of his face. I got great satisfaction when I saw beads of blood well up along the gutters of torn skin.
“Stop being such a stupid little cunt,” Max said and slammed me face first into the back seat of his BMW SUV. He jerked my hands together and zip tied them fast enough that I was certain he’d done it before.
I noticed a dark unmarked SUV still parked in front of Valen’s place, the doors open as if the occupants left in a hurry. Of course they had, it contained the men who were inside beating Valen into a pulp even as we fled the mansion.
“You have to let me go!” I wailed as he pushed me down onto the leather seat. “I need to go help him!”
“You need to get your ass home so you can hang onto whatever shreds of virtue you have left,” he said with a growl.
“You can’t make me!” I screamed and began to kick him rapidly with my feet. I was on my stomach still, so I was kicking upwards with my heels but I was making contact. I heard him grunt a couple times, so I knew I connected.
I hoped it fucking hurt.
“Stop it!” he bellowed and gathered a fistful of my hair from behind. “Fucking stop it, you stupid fucking cunt!”
He pushed my face down into the leather seat and I screamed until my throat felt like bloodied raw meat, but he didn’t let me up. He climbed on top of me and the weight of him pressed me into the seat even harder.
I panicked. I felt sick and terrified as I was trapped beneath Max’s body. Although Kingston had forced me my first time, I’d wanted it. My head and heart and body had been into it, even as I’d struggled, I’d only fought to a point.
But with Max, it was like every cell in my body was diametrically opposed to his presence on my back. I could feel the hard shaft of his cock pressing into my ass cheek, and his knee cruelly spread my legs apart, but I screamed harder out of rage and disgust.
I didn’t want this, none of it. He made me sick, his mere presence left a tang of bile in the back of my throat.
My head flooded with panic as he pushed me farther into the leather seat and my breath was cut off. I choked and gagged and he breathed heavily into my ear.
“I could fuck you right now if I wanted to,” he said and I gasped for breath but nothing came. My lips were pressed so tight against the leather that I could taste it. “I could fuck your ass and the Organization wouldn’t even know. You’d still be a virgin, wouldn’t you?”
I screamed again, but my throat was stuck and my mouth was noiseless.
“I’ll get my chance, Everly. When we win, I’ll tear you apart and send you into the dark. Do you know what we do with Tributes? Do you? Have you ever looked into what happened to the ones before you? They’re gone, just like you will be. They’ve been sold and nobody fucking cares. Nobody could do a fucking thing about it, the Organization runs the fucking world.”
Fear jumped like arcs of electricity between the neurons in my brain. I wanted to fight so hard, but I was trapped. I was completely and utterly helpless under Max’s powerful body.
I began to black out, my consciousness circled my brain like a water around a drain at the bottom of a sink. I could almost see the end, the pure black, deep hole and I wanted to fall inside. I wanted to dive inside. I wanted to escape my reality.
And then he said, “Remember that. Remember that I let you go.”
And he pushed himself up and off me. He climbed out of his SUV and slammed the door as I turned my head and took a deep, gasping breath.
The air burned like fire and filled my lungs like lava, but it felt so good. Galaxies of light in the darkness disappeared from the edges of my eyes as oxygen flooded my brain again at long last.
I sobbed and choked with hot tears spilling from my eyes as Max climbed into the driver’s seat and started his car.
“Home, then?” he said in a chipper voice, as if he hadn’t just tried to kill me. “Or would you like to park somewhere private and give me your ass?”
“Fuh-uck yo-ou,” I retched and gasped. I wanted to wipe the tears from my eyes, but my hands were still bound. I felt my heart slamming in my chest as I worried about Valen and felt sick again as I thought about him beaten and laying on the floor, bleeding and broken.
Max pulled away from the mansion, hit the main street and sped towards my house with his laughter ringing in my ears.
I didn’t know how it would happen, but I would get my revenge on him, too. He would fucking pay for this. They all would.
But until then, I just had to survive.
* * *
I wokeup Monday morning with aching wrists and a headache from Max’s assault on Sunday. The moment he’d opened the door and cut the ties off my wrists, I’d jumped from Max’s car and run to the house. I’d thrown open the door, scrambled upstairs to my room and called Kingston to let him know what had happened.