Page 43 of Lessons in Cruelty

“You’re scared because I know how to hurt you,” I whisper. My hand slides from her wrist to her hip, fingers digging in possessively. “You’re scared because you want me to hurt you. Even after all these years, Haven, it still scares you how much you need me.”

She tries to shake her head, but I catch her chin, forcing her to look at me. Those blue eyes are wide, pupils dilated.

“Liar,” I breathe, and her lips part on a soft gasp. “Your body remembers what I used to do to you in those woods. You might have forgotten how you’d beg for more, even through your tears…but your body remembers.”

“All I remember is being your punching bag,” she says, blue eyes blazing with barely tempered fury.

“If you hated it so much, why the fuck did you keep coming back for more, huh?”

She licks her lips, eyes narrowing, but the anger in them fades like a flame starved of oxygen. “You’re all I had, Kai.”

A pulse of something—guilt, shame, regret, who the fuck knows?—tightens my chest. But I know this game. She’s played it so many times before. Poor little Haven, the unloved girl.

“Until I wasn’t anymore, right?”

She opens her mouth, but I don’t let her speak. I’ve had enough of her poisonous lies.

“Listen to me, Heavenly. You’re gonna get in your car, and you’re gonna drive out of here, and you’re not even gonna look in your fucking rearview mirror.”

Another sound, this one definitely a protest because it’s accompanied by a furious wriggle of her hips, like she’s trying to break out of my grip.

“Shhh, shhh,” I whisper, coiling my arm tighter around her middle like a python. “You’re not listening, Heavenly.” My voice becomes a frustrated rasp.

She goes still. The breath puffing against my fingers from her nose comes in short, hard huffs.

I brush my lips against the shell of her ear. “You stay the fuck away from this place, or I’ll have some or other irregularity in your paperwork surface. Something Bobby will have to come sort out in person.”

She gives one savage jerk in my grip and sinks her nails into my arm.

“You don’t want that, do you? Daddy Dearest staggering in here, demanding to know what the fuck is so important he had to stop hitting his pipe?”

The plan had been percolating in my brain since last night when she told me to go fuck myself. I know for a fact he used to cuff her upside the head whenever she talked back to him.

But it’s not her fear I’m after this time.

It’s her pride.

Bobby didn’t scare her as much as he embarrassed her.

Riversiders are eighty percent pride, twenty percent stubbornness.

The fight leaves her body like I’d been holding a marionette doll and someone cut the strings. She slumps forward, her weight falling against me.

My cock hardens even more in my lap, pressure building.

I slide my hand off her mouth. I lean back, grabbing her shoulders, holding her up for inspection to see how deep the knife slid in.

Oh yeah, I hit a nerve all right. Judging from how pale her face is, maybe even a fucking artery.

I give her a soft shake, and her head just flops, like she doesn’t have the strength to keep her neck stiff.

“There it is,” I murmur, a smile tugging at my lips as I study her ashen face, the smudges under her eyes, the dark mark on her jaw where she must have hit the car last night when I⁠—

Fuck.

Didn’t know it would leave a bruise.

A surge of nausea tightens my stomach.