you?” Dornan points to me and before I can move, Chad has sidled up alongside me and grabbed me in a bear hug, his hand planted firmly over my mouth. I gasp, unable to scream. I look over at Jase, whose peaceful breakfast has been shattered by all the ruckus.
“Pop,” Jase says slowly, “what’s going on? Who the hell is this guy?”
“What’s your name, son?” Dornan demands. “Speak!”
“M-Michael.”
Michael Trevine.
I just have one question for you, baby girl.
The boy is terrified. One of his eyes is swollen shut, there is blood all over him, and I wonder how much of the long journey back to LA was spent beating him.
Tears form at the corner of my eyes as the full brunt of Dornan’s obsession with me becomes apparent. He left me here for this . He asked me who my ex-boyfriend was, and then proceeded to travel across the country to kidnap an innocent boy from his house. A boy who has never laid eyes on me, a boy who I found online and added to Sammi’s backstory for credibility.
A boy with a gun pointed at his head.
I struggle against Chad’s stronghold, but it is useless. The guy is built, and he’s probably been snorting the white powder with Daddy Dornan all the way home.
I bite down on Chad’s hand and he pulls it away, yelling at me.
“He’s not my ex!” I scream, fighting against Chad’s rigid embrace.
Dornan looks at me like a man possessed. A man on a mission.
“I lied,” I gasp, still struggling. “I’ve never met him before. Please, just let him go.”
Dornan lowers his gun and looks me up and down. “You don’t have to be scared of him anymore,” he says.
He lifts the gun, his finger putting pressure on the trigger.
“Please!” I scream.
My pleas go unheeded.
He pulls the trigger.
Two things happen. Firstly, the roar of a single bullet as it leaves Dornan’s gun and enters the back of the boy’s head. Secondly, almost at the exact same time, I am showered with a fine mist of blood and what I think are pieces of Michael Trevine’s skull.
Michael lays on the ground, motionless. The red cloud around his head grows swiftly, reaching my flip flops. I scream and Chad releases me, letting me slump to the ground. I crawl through blood and bits of skull to get to the dead boy, cradling him in my arms. He is heavy, a dead weight, because he is dead. And it is my fault.
I heft the boy onto my lap and realize his eyes are still open.
Fuck.
With trembling fingers, I reach over and press his eyelids shut.
I feel hands on my shoulders, pulling me away, and it takes everything inside me not to kick and claw and bite Dornan as he carries me away. He pulls my clothes off and puts me in the shower, where I huddle into a ball and stare at the lines of grout that separate each white tile.
You don’t have to be scared of him anymore.
I make a strangled sobbing sound, but nothing much comes out of my throat except a dried-up, pathetic scream.
Dornan pulls me from the shower, wraps me in a towel and walks me to his bed, where he sits me down.
“Do you understand how much I care about you now?” Dornan asks with a throat full of gravel. His hands are all over me, feverish, and I don’t fight back when he presses me down onto the bed and unbuckles his belt.
I just lay there, in shock, his lips at my throat and his hands roving every inch of my shell-shocked body.
“Do you know why I did that?” he breathes in my ear as he grips my hips and slides inside me.
My breath hitches in my throat as he begins to thrust into me, and I feel a single tear roll down the side of my face.
“Because I’m yours,” I whisper into the darkness.
THIRTEEN
If I think watching Michael die in front of me for a careless lie I created is bad, the aftermath is horrific.
Dornan is high, the blood on his hands washed clean away but still leaving invisible handprints all over my body that spell murderer .
Because it is my fault. I should never have used a real person’s name in my fake
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