“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I was, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and Valen joined him on the other side.
“There’s so much wrong, but I don’t know where to start.”
“Start from the beginning,” Archer said with a quiet laugh.
I sighed and bunched my shoulders up before hugging myself tightly.
“I don’t know where the beginning of all this is,” I replied. “If I did, I would tell you.”
“You’re scaring me, babe,” Valen said, and he reached out to rub my shoulder. I pulled away. I didn’t want to be touched.
It wasn’t even that I didn’t want them to touch me. It was that I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I felt miserable as if I was an island in the middle of an ocean of people. They could smash up against my shores, but in the end, I was completely alone inside my head, filled with shame.
When I was attacking Maksim, it was for what he’d done to me, the assault.
And I was tired of pussyfooting around what it was. I was tired of couching it in kinder language, so I didn’t have to face reality.
He raped me. Or I should say he used Avery, my sister, to rape me by proxy. He held a gun to my head and forced me to fake an orgasm for his sick pleasure.
After he’d done that, he’d kept the gun pointed at me and edged slowly down my side to where Avery was still crouched between my legs, her face shining with my juices.
The thought of it sickened me.
He’d dragged her up to look at him and then fucked her face, still between my legs.
And as he was getting closer to climax, he’d taken the barrel of his handgun and shoved it inside of me. He’d commanded Avery to touch me then, to manually rub my clit, and he told me if I didn’t like it, then he’d pull the trigger.
I had to fake it all over again, this time with the gun inside my body, half a second away from being shot like that. Maksim had spent the entire time taunting me and mocking my Kings.
Sex and pleasure, Maksim and Avery. They were all twisted and tangled up now that I’d gotten them here under my control.
I didn’t want to feel this way; I wanted things to go back to normal.
But it was impossible now.
I was a monster. I’d gotten wet slicing Maksim’s ear off. I’d gotten so fucking hot standing over him with that much power, with his life and death balanced in my hand.
I would have done anything to get fucked at that point, to have one of my Kings ram his hard cock deep inside, to slam into me and make me come as I taunted my enemy with the threat of death.
Maksim had turned me into him, and for that, I could never forgive him. I’d allowed it to happen, though, and for that, I could never forgive myself.
I thought I left that sick side of my psyche behind as I worked so hard at Fincross. I had been working on my degree, but also my normality. I’d been trying to fly under the radar and rebuild my head, cell by cell and memory by memory, to become a normal, boring girl.
Normal by my standards, at least. Maybe not by society’s, with my four Kings in my life, I wanted it to be as boring as possible. No drama, no lust for killing, no dreams of hurting those who hurt others.
I wasn’t trying to be some avenging angel figure. I just wanted to be a regular woman with a career helping animals and the environment.
Was that going to be possible for me? Would I ever manage to pull the broken pieces together this time, or would the cracks be too deep to hide?
I would forever carry the scars of all this. I would never leave it behind.
And I could never let it see the light of day. I had to hide it forever, especially from my Kings, or they would know what a terrible, twisted beauty they’d fallen in love with.
I was flawed, and if they knew how deep it went, they couldn’t love me. They shouldn’t love me.
Who could love a woman like me?