Twisted - Esme Devlin Page 0,72
him to hold me. I wanted him to lie in bed next to me and stroke my hair until I fell asleep. I needed him. Not anymore. It’s too late for that.
Now I can’t stomach the thought of him touching me. Trying to comfort me when he was the one who just cracked me in half.
“Get off me.” I spit the words out, shoving him away.
“No.”
His arm tightens around my waist.
“Get off!”
He chuckles this time.
“I’d tell you to make me, but we both know you don’t even want me to get off you. It just makes you feel better about giving in if you think you put up a fight. You’re fooling no one, silly girl.”
I have one arm free, my left one. I could hammer it down on his chest, and he would only laugh at me. If he didn’t have that fucking mask on, I would poke him clean in the eye.
If he didn’t have the mask on…
My free hand jerks up.
My fingers trace the side of his cold metal face.
Before I can get any sort of hold on it, he’s up off the bed like a bullet from a gun.
“Biiiiiiiiiig fucking mistake.”
In all the time I’ve known him, he’s spoken to me like that precisely zero times.
My heart jumps into my mouth while my stomach simultaneously sinks.
I back away from the edge of the bed he just got out of.
My second mistake.
His arms reach around my neck from behind.
He’s behind me.
He pulls me out, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to resist his strength.
My bottom lip trembles.
The tiny hairs on my body stand up to his attention.
“I-I-I’m sorry.” I choke the words out just as he jerks me off the bed. He probably didn’t even hear me. He’s dragging me across the floor.
“Sorry? Sorry!” He laughs, and that is so much worse than the previous tone he used. “That does not work with me.”
“I didn’t—”
“Shh,” he says, hushing me. I’m half on the floor, half in his arms, and he sits down behind me so I’m leaning back on his chest, his grip around my neck not letting up for a second. “It’s quite all right. Of course you’d be ungrateful! And why wouldn’t you be? There is such a difference between showing and experiencing. I have been careless and forgotten that in my obsession with you.”
I blink my eyes closed and tears spill out, running down my cheeks. “What are you talking about?”
I wish the man would just say what he means. I could scream.
“Why would you feel beholden to me when you have never experienced my wrath? I’ve never hurt you—I cannot hurt you. That is my weakness. But I will teach you. That I can do.”
He’s up again, pulling me with him. I’m trembling. My legs aren’t strong enough to take my own weight, but it doesn’t stop him. He continues on anyway, dragging me back to the end of the bed.
He hauls me up to my feet, and I lash out against him. I’m not even thinking anymore. This is just sheer instinct taking over. I can’t flee so I’m fighting.
And like every other time, it is useless.
“Don’t fight this,” he warns.
Fuck him.
He pushes me up against the bedpost using the wall that is his body.
I push and scream and try to bite.
He just lets out a huff of air and brings his hand to my neck.
“This will only take a second,” he says. “Faster if you’re still.”
And then he does what I fear the most.
He squeezes.
To think it was barely an hour ago that I enjoyed this.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Eyes wide, everything but my hands freezes. My hands latch on to his wrist, trying desperately to get him off me while the familiar feeling of suffocation and panic spreads through my body.
He takes his belt off quickly with his free hand, and as soon as it’s loose, he releases the pressure on my neck, just as he promised.
I gasp for air, but he doesn’t give me a second to recover. He pulls my arms up above my head and wraps the belt around once, twice, thrice. Four times. Then he buckles it together.
I’m still fighting for air, coughing and spluttering, when he takes a step back.
“I hate you for what you tried to do,” he says. “But I admit, there is a small part of me that is pleased about the consequences.”
With that, he turns on his heels and swaggers over to the far corner of the