Boy in the Club a boy & billionaire novel - Rachel Kane Page 0,83
just drawn blood across his cheek. En garde! “If you both like to grind men into dust so they’ll do your bidding…”
He shakes his head, and I don’t really remember him walking back across the room, when did he get so close to me?
“Not like Jimi. Jimi is a pretender, a poser. Nobody obeys him naturally. Nobody would, if he didn’t have those gold chains and bodyguards. Any man that goes on his knees in front of Jimi does so out of threat.”
“And you’ve never threatened anyone.”
He looks like a naughty little boy caught in his mischief, rolling his eyes to the glass ceiling. “Well…”
“You’ve never brought anyone to their knees, who wasn’t willing to be brought down?”
“Okay, okay, but you’re asking what I want, not how it actually is. Yes, sometimes men have to be broken. Sometimes you’ve really got to hurt them, so they know their place. So they understand what they want.”
“Which is to worship you.”
“Exactly.”
“I swear to god, you are the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.”
“And it turns you on.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I see how red your cheeks are.”
God, how is he so close to me? When did that happen?
“It’s just warm in here, all that sun.”
“Yeah? Did the sun give you that hard-on too? You think I can miss seeing that?”
“You might think you own the world,” I whisper, “but you don’t. You’re just another man, another weak, grasping man who wants everything and wishes he could give nothing in return.”
“And you?” His whisper is just as quiet. “You spend your whole life waiting for someone to tell you how awful you are, because you want someone to agree with your own opinion of yourself. You think I don’t see you touching your scar, literally every time something goes wrong? Look, you’re doing it now.”
I hadn’t even realized, but he’s right. My fingertips are tracing the scar again. I lower my hand. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“One day you’re going to tell me how you got that thing.”
“I already told you.”
“You lied. No, don’t argue with me. You lied, and you know it. A hundred men a day lie to me, Finn, and part of my job is to call them out on it, to bring them to the truth.”
We are on such dangerous ground. I’m falling, falling, falling. I could tell him everything, right now. I could.
I can’t.
I take a step back.
“I wanted to ask you how you felt, and I guess I have my answer,” I tell him. “You’re in love with yourself. You’re your own perfect man. You don’t need me.”
“Doesn’t every god need a worshiper?” he says.
“You’re not a god.”
“Get on your knees, Finn.”
“What?”
My heart is beating so fast. My mind is telling me to escape. My whole nervous system is shouting, flee, flee, like there’s not just a cobra in the room, but a tiger, hungry for blood. I should bolt. Fuck, I should resign. This is not the place for me. If I thought the club was trying to break me down, then what is Colby trying to do? He must destroy everyone in his path. That’s why you never hear about his exes, they’re probably all molecules by now, grains of sand, crushed to nothingness, blown away in the wind.
“On your knees,” he says, and I will not obey him, I must not obey him.
His eyes hold one simple, sharp expression: A sense that no one can deny him.
My heart, my heart, it’s going to stop right here, I’m going to fall down dead, I’ll fall straight through the glass, forever and ever.
I wish I could speak, but there’s not a drop of water left in my body, and my mouth is dry, my tongue heavy like a shard of terra cotta.
I feel like I might cry.
He knows you’re lying.
How? How does he know that? Does he know the whole story? Has he sent a team of investigators to pry into my past?
Not Colby.
He wouldn’t do that.
“Finn,” he says, and in his voice is the steel of command.
I think the only way forward is to stop fighting.
I wanted something from him that he simply wasn’t willing to give. I wanted him to speak from his heart.
Now I’ve lost the battle, and must be humiliated.
Yet, even knowing that, it is a surprise to find myself kneeling.
A surprise? A shock. I don’t feel in control of my own body. I feel like a puppet with Colby holding my strings, lowering me gently to my knees in