“Aww, poor little loser,” Avery snickered. “Must have sucked, being fucked by your step daddy and used by the boys in school.”
“Nobody used me, and he didn’t fuck me,” I replied. Her words hurt, though, like the burning itch left behind after a bug bite. “I was a virgin the when I finally—”
“When you finally fucked that Taylor boy?” Reg snickered. “Isn’t it funny that his father, Rick, had been in your cunt before him? He’d already broken in the goods long before his little piss ant son got to the party. We shoulda shown Kingston what we did, and he might have gotten it right from the start.”
I didn’t know what happened to me, a white-hot rage coursed through my body at his words, and I lost my mind.
I pushed myself away from the chair, tipping it over in the meantime. It was heavy and toppled to the ground with a dull thud. I let out a screech of pain and fiery anger and rushed to the table where Maksim was sitting with his pear. He’d dropped the little knife to the table’s surface, and that’s all I could see. The blade shone under the glow of the lights, a beacon for my righteous fire of betrayal and trauma. It called me to it, begging me to plunge it into Reg’s body. I needed a blood payment for the sins he’d committed against me. The shooting hadn’t been enough.
I needed more.
I was grinding my teeth without realizing it when I made contact with the knife. I wrapped my fingers around the handle and held it above my head. I whirled around, facing Reg, and watched his face turn from smug satisfaction to abject fear as he realized what was happening.
I was attacking him again, and this time I didn’t intend to fail.
I stepped up onto a footstool and launched myself off it, getting air as I sailed across the space between us. My legs extended like a ballerina, and for a moment, I felt like I was flying.
Until I hit his body, knocked him off balance, and brought the blade down to his neck.
He screeched like a little girl, fell back, and landed on his ass. The blade was buried to the hilt in his neck, and I pushed him to the floor, his head hitting the polished hardwood with a loud thwack that felt so good it was almost as good as hitting him the first time.
I wanted more blood. I’ve maybe seen too many movies, but I expected spurts of hot red liquid spraying out of his neck and down the front of me. I wanted it, to smell the ferric scent of his life draining from his body and get my revenge at last.
Reg’s eyes were huge and filled with horror as he locked them on my face, and his mouth was a gaping maw of fear. I twisted the knife, hoping for something, red tinting the edge at least, anything. But nothing came out. Nothing happened.
Reg put his hand on mine, holding the blade still, and he choked back some words in his throat. I thought I heard him gargle, and I imagined him drinking back his own blood, drowning in it. Behind me, Maksim and Avery were silent, watching.
And just when I thought I was winning and Reg was losing his life, at last, he twitched and narrowed his eyes. His hand gripped mine, the one holding the knife handle, and his look of fear turned to a smile.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Fucking die, already!”
He opened his mouth and began to laugh at me. His laugh turned to a maniacal gleeful chuckle as he dropped his hand off mine and pushed at me.
I flipped out, lost my mind, and stabbed him again in the neck. Over and over again and again, the knife blade flashed bright silver and then disappeared as it sunk into his neck, but he didn’t stop laughing. He wouldn’t stop laughing.
Finally, he shoved me again, and I fell back, holding the knife in my hand. I stared at it in puzzlement and confusion and couldn’t understand why it was still clean. It was shiny and completely free of blood.
“You stupid little whore,” Reg laughed in my face and shoved me again, forcing me off his body until I fell to the side onto the floor. “You dumb fucking cunt. Thanks for thinking ahead on that one, Max. She would have cut my head off with it.”
“Why aren’t you dead?” I asked, and then it clicked. The knife literally clicked. I stabbed my own hand, sinking the blade into my flesh, or at least making it appear as if it was going in. But it wasn’t, the blade was fake, and every time I hit my own flesh, it slid back up into the handle, giving the appearance of cutting into my hand. “Fuck!” I shrieked.
“Yeah, fuck,” Maksim said, standing behind the table with the real knife in his hand. “I believe you were going for this, weren’t you? What a little devil you are! So impressive! Bloodthirsty and murderous, a woman after my own heart. My beautiful fiancé, a treasure to behold and a woman to treasure for the rest of her life, however short it might be.”
“Why did you do this?” I asked, pulling myself up from the floor to stand on shaking legs. “Why are you such a sick fuck?”
“Because I wanted to see what happened,” he grinned. “I wanted to poke you and see if you would jump. And you did, my little juicy peach, you did!”
It was a fake knife set there to trap me and test my reaction to Reg being brought in.
Whatever stupid game Maksim was playing, I had lost.
I just hoped I hadn’t lost my Kings in the process.
CHAPTER7
I was left alonein a small bedroom on the top floor. It felt more like a prison cell than anything else, but it offered me some peace and privacy to properly grieve my confinement and being kept from my Kings.
The stupid situation with Reg happened two nights ago, and I had been frantic without news of the rest of my family, but the solitude had been good for my soul. I wanted to be left alone, but I wanted to find my Kings, Amara and Ivan.