Heartless - Jade West Page 0,27

me lose myself in my pain.

Oh God, please, I wanted to lose myself in my pain too.

I wanted the perfect monster to make me hurt for him.

Please, give it to me. Please.

But no.

Like a switch had flicked inside him, his fire turned to ice.

“I have no time for your worthless shit,” he told me. “You’re nothing but a sad little bitch from a bitch of a family. All of you can rot in hell, and I’ll help you get there.” His pause hurt me more than his hands ever could. “But it won’t be today. Not while you’re asking for it.”

My lip kept on trembling, and the cold in his eyes chilled my bones. I was silent as he backed away from me, his sneer blooming on his lips.

“Enjoy your breaths, little girl,” he said. “I’ll be coming for you one day. In the meantime, keep playing your pathetic little games of self-harm.”

I wanted to beg him to stay, even though it was insanity piled on top of insanity, and made no sense to my soul. I didn’t beg him for anything. I summoned enough pride from the scrappy little pits of my heart and stayed silent as he walked away, watching him leave with my sobs battling in my chest.

He didn’t even look back.

I flinched as the front door slammed closed behind him, and then the sobs burst their way free from my lungs.

Predictably, the cocaine burst its way free from my clutch soon after.

11

Lucian

The bitch had twisted me up inside, so tight I didn’t even know my own mind as I left that slum of a building. I marched out into the street, hoping that a random lowlife freak would come chasing after me, just so I could slam my fist into some fool’s flesh and make them suffer.

They didn’t. It was me, alone, wandering through downtown in the early hours of the morning, barely aware of my surroundings as I paced through the city.

It was all on her. Her pathetic little soul begging mine for peace. Her burning heart flaring up to lash out, even in her weakest moments. Her fear, so pretty. Her eyes, so wide and hurt.

Her need for touch and pain, blurring together to take her to the heights.

She was a masochist, and I knew it, even if she didn’t truly know it herself.

She put her need for release through pain down to whatever traumas she’d pushed into her depths, but she was wrong. I’d seen enough paintoy sluts to know what she was. She was one of them. I’d put every ounce of my fortune on it.

It was the swell in my pants that told me just how desperate a paintoy she really was. She had potential to be the best of the best, and I felt it with every single beat of my filthy heart.

But no. NO. She was a Constantine. Her pain had to be about my pleasure, not hers.

I knew Violent Delights would be empty, and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have scratched the itch that Elaine Constantine had triggered in me. I could’ve summoned up a fresh girl to hurt, picking any type of slut of my choosing, but that wouldn’t have scratched it either.

I could’ve even picked up a woman from the street and played my cash purchase game with a total stranger, but I didn’t.

I did nothing, just kept walking through the night until the sun finally poked its head above the towers, thinking about Elaine Constantine and the hellfire I needed to rain down on her family.

I wished I’d never seen the bitch up close in the first place. I wished I’d have pursued Tinsley Constantine like I’d set out to do that night. Hurting a girl on her birthday in the Constantine compound would have been a stab in the heart to her whole family tree. A crazy one, but one long overdue.

NYC was bustling with Sunday morning life when I finally came to my senses and called Hunter Sparro up on my cell. He was still in bed when he answered, his voice slurred with a clear hangover from the night before. I could read him a mile off.

That’s what friendship does to you after the best part of a lifetime, of course. It allows you to read each other as well as you can read yourself.

I heard a woman’s voice next to him, moaning out a who is it? and realized it must be a repeat conquest considering that she was asking