He picks me up off my feet, using his height advantage against me, but I don’t put up a fight, knowing to wait and play to my strengths.
He loosens the hold he has around my waist and hits the button for the penthouse before spinning me around and pinning me to the wall.
With his hand still over my mouth, he presses his body against mine and brings his face closer, his temper making him seem larger somehow, like a barely contained storm in a port threatening to destroy everything around him, namely me right now.
“I told you that mouth was going to get you into trouble one day, didn’t I? The thing is, Cherry,” he spits out, using his nickname for me, but said with so much hostility if I were less angry myself I would have felt his words pierce what’s left of my heart. As it is, it bounces off me like everything he says. All his outrage does is fuel mine until there is no room left inside me to contain it, and when there is no space inside, it leaves only one place for it to go. Outward.
I bite his hand, making him curse before I growl in fury, like some wild untamed creature.
He silences me with his mouth, his kiss, wild and filled with dark promises. There’s no turning back from this. Once you have been this deep, there is no going back to the shallows. It’s sink or swim, but right now, I’m drowning in all that is him.
I don’t know who moves next, but the next conscious thought I have is when the red haze starts to pull back, I’m bleeding from a split lip where he bit me, and he has a scratch on his face from the top of his cheekbone down to his jaw.
The elevator pings open, but neither of us pulls apart, both breathing heavily as we stare at each other with equal parts lust and hate.
I wipe the blood from my lip with the back of my hand and step out of the elevator backward, unable to sever the connection between us.
He doesn’t follow me out, doesn’t speak, doesn’t even blink. He just hits the button and waits for the doors to slide shut, finally freeing us both from the blazing heat tethering us together.
I move on autopilot to the apartment in a haze. Perhaps if my head had been clear, I would have heard the warning bells clanging in my head. But when I knock on the door, all I feel is restless and agitated.
“Hello, Red,” Kai greets as he swings the door open. I lift my head at the sound of Kai’s voice and freeze solid, as I stare over his shoulder at Zodiac standing just behind him. His eyes rake hungrily over my body as I turn my gaze up to Kai’s carefully blank one. The staggering weight of their betrayal, although expected, hangs heavily between us. His face shows no remorse, so I do the only thing I can—I shut down everything that makes me Viddy and become the Gemini they made me.
“Sweet words, pretty faces, dirty fucking liars. It’s a tale as old as time.” I laugh, a hollow sound that makes Kai wince. I don’t say anything after that because Kai steps forward and presses something to my arm, making my body convulse as volts of fire wash over me and then blissfully everything goes black.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I don’t wake slowly, hazy, and confused about what happened. I wake with the taste of betrayal on my tongue and the clarity that all my suspicions were true. Just this once though, I desperately wanted to be wrong.
I’m tied at the wrist and ankles to a wooden chair, with ropes as opposed to cuffs, judging by the fibers I feel cutting into my arms as I pull against the restraints.
There’s a bag or sack of some kind over my head, but it’s thin enough that I can see faintly through it. If I had to guess, I would say I’m in either some kind of warehouse or basement. There are no windows and the only door I can see is across the room from where I’m sitting, up three wooden steps. The rest of the room is concrete and completely barren, bar me and the chair I’m sitting on. It reminds me of the basement in the kill cabin, suggesting it’s unlikely I’ll be walking out of