What’s coming next, I don’t know, but I’m certain of one thing. The monster is there before me, I’ve defied him, and now there is going to be hell to pay.
14
Breaking
“Take. It. Off. Now.” Spider grits the words out between clenched teeth.
Desperate, I latch onto the one thing that might save me from the indignation of what’s unfolding. “No. Ben is inside! He could come—”
Spider turns his head to Pip, who’s standing by the clubhouse doors. “Prospect, send Ben upstairs now.”
Pip goes inside, and I hear him call for Ben.
Spider prowls toward me.
Expecting him to order me to whip the shirt off right here and bare all to the entire club, I backpedal away from him. But he doesn’t speak. Instead, he seizes the front of the shirt at the collar in both fists, and with a single hard jerk, he tears the cloth right down the middle.
The ripping sound is long and loud and brutal in my ears. It’s painfully familiar, a sound I’ve heard all too often before, seconds before a whipping starts and women scream at the lash.
When my breasts spring free, the crowd surrounding us whoops and catcalls. A few of the men wolf whistle. It’s a display one would never see from the crowd in His Holy Peace, and the sounds serve as a bizarre salvation, something that keeps me firmly in the here and now. Painfully present in a moment from which I wish I could disappear.
I let out a whimper, trying to turn from Spider and cover my exposed breasts with my arms. He doesn’t give me the chance. He swats my arms away and grabs the back of my hair, yanking hard enough that I cry out at the sting.
His eyes burn into me, his face unforgiving above mine. “How many times do I have to tell you, thief? Didn’t last night drive the lesson home enough for you?”
I pant and huff, writhing in his grip, trying to pry his hands away. Until his words sink in.
The thought of feeling his belt across my backside again sends a jolt through me, like an electrical shock. It quells any resistance and I go still, chest heaving, shaking my head at him. Pleading for mercy that will never come.
There is no man here with me now. There is only the animal, the Outlaw who means to silence my resistance and put me in my place.
“You don’t get to say no to me,” he growls. He spins me around so that my back is to him, grabbing my nape. And leaving my breasts in full view of everyone here, along with the cuts he’s branded on my chest in the shape of a spider’s web.
“Fuck, this is gonna be hot.” Striker’s voice filters through the hammer of my heart. He’s standing at the railing, eyes watching hungrily, and I half register Reaper standing at his side, taking it all in.
“You don’t hide, and you do not hide my mark on you from anyone,” Spider adds, snapping my focus back to him. “Obviously, I went too easy on you last time.”
Too easy on me? Whipping me black and blue was too easy?
Panic chokes me as he yanks my hands behind my back and folds my arms there, holding my wrists with one hand. For half a second, I expect him to clap me in irons and march me over to a whipping post. But then he marches me up the steps and across the deck, right past the highest ranking members of both clubs.
Shame mixes with burning anger, and I twist in his grip, but it’s useless.
Spider shoves me through the door and into the crowd, marching me past the bar.
I buck and writhe, but his grip is unrelenting. He seems even stronger than normal, as if whatever anger and adrenaline that was already coursing through him as a result of today’s useless excursion has amplified his strength.
A weird thought strikes me then. I see an image in my mind, just for an instant. A man with green skin, growing bigger by the second, shirt and pants tearing at the seams. It bubbles up from my subconsciousness, something I’ve seen before, but it has no context, and makes no sense.
Except it does. It’s a warning from my back-brain, half understood, that I’ve tapped into something inside of Spider, done more than tick him off.
The man inside him is gone, withdrawn so deeply that there’s only the monster.