Evil's Pawn - Raven Dark Page 0,131

in his voice mocks my mounting anger.

“Why do you do this to me?” I grumble, resting my chin on the pillow.

“Why?” He rests his chin on my shoulder. “Because you’re fucking hot. Because you’re mine. Because I like hurting you.”

I shake my head. “You can’t mean that. I refuse to believe you thrive off pain. There has to be more to it.”

He grunts. “Is this where you start spouting bullshit about how you know there’s good in me? You think you can save me from my demons, Emma? Turn me into the good guy with your magic cunt?”

Okay, now he’s just being deliberately cruel. I’m trying to understand him, trying to find some semblance of hope, but maybe there isn’t any to hold on to.

“Get off me.”

He chuckles and holds me tighter. “There’s no goodness for you here. Stop holding out for it.”

But he’s lying. I saw the good in him once. I spent a week with a man who’s now unrecognizable to the one in this bed with me. It’s like Spider’s buried him deep inside where I can’t reach him.

Spider reaches around to my throat again, and panic seizes me, but he doesn’t choke me. Instead, he unclips the leash from the front of the collar and tosses it aside so that it dangles from the bed post. “Go to sleep, woman,” he murmurs in my ear. “Rest up. You’ll need your energy for tomorrow night when we do this again.”

Wow.

Helplessness seizes my ankles and yanks me further down into its icy cold depths. How could I have ever fallen for him? How could I have ever thought there was anything between us? Shame guts me, sadness ripping at my heart.

Tequila had told me to embrace the part of me that needed him, that thrived off the danger in him. She’d told me to embrace the darkness inside him, but I can’t do that. I can’t accept him if all there is for me is pain and a broken heart.

The thing is, if I can’t accept him—if I can’t accept this as my life—then where does that leave me?

It’s probably going to sound strange, but I feel almost tricked, deceived. It’s like he’s gaslighting me into believing what we had was only an illusion. The Colony tricked me into believing the world was an evil place, full of dangers from which only they could protect me, and yet Spider isn’t so different from them. He’s trying to convince me that what we had was false, that the man I fell for isn’t there.

I guess this is the moment when it happened. When I realized I’d been fooling myself, that I’d been trying to hold onto the hope that the man I fell for was still inside him waiting to be saved.

That man isn’t buried. Spider’s killed him. Cap said that the men in the club need both to survive, but Spider’s somehow able to do so without the grounding, humanizing influence of the man. The beast inside has devoured him, the Outlaw had ended him and buried his body in the desert, and I’m never getting him back.

Slowly, I feel myself finally letting go of the hope I’d been nurturing for so long. The hope for something more, for something meaningful, something worth fighting for.

A sad, heavy sort of acceptance sinks in, hollowing me out.

As I drop off to sleep in his cold, dark embrace, my heart shatters one final time. It shatters, and I, too, bury someone tonight. I bury the innocent, naïve woman who made the mistake of falling for a monster.

The end of Book Two of

DEVIL’S OUTLAWS MC

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