My voice gets a little wobbly, emotion slipping through, as some suppressed anger stirs my tears.
His lips are on mine in the next instant, and I stupidly let my fingers tangle in his hair, feeling so starved for affection that I allow myself a moment of weakness.
Arion’s hand moves toward the front of my skirt, but I stop it.
“Friends,” I blurt out as I cut my face away from his.
He groans as he slaps the bed beside my head and hangs his own head, the black wisps of his hair hiding his face from me, as he makes a frustrated sound.
After a long beat of silence, his head finally comes up, and solid black eyes stare into mine. The fear factor has ebbed these past five months, because I’m inappropriately unintimidated by him.
“I’ll be your friend. For now,” he says in a way that sounds more like a warning. “But unless you cut ties to me, you will become my bride. You’ve not seen me chase yet, love. You just think you have.”
He’s gone in the next instant, his presence so abruptly ejected from my room that I almost swear I made it all up.
My head thumps against the bed, and I shove the heels of my palms against my eye sockets.
My body protests his departure, and I barely stop myself from begging him to come back.
“I certainly didn’t struggle like this when I broke up with Jerome,” I grumble aloud. “And I thought he was the man I’d marry back then.”
Anna pops her head over mine, making a tsking sound. “Comparing them to Jerome is like comparing Confucius to Curly the Stooge. They’re both bald, but one has a lot more going on inside the bald head,” she says as if it makes all the sense in the world.
“Not now, Anna. Not. Now,” I bite out. “I need to—”
The wall explodes across from us, glass shattering from the mirrors and raining down all around me. Anna screams, as a stunned breath gets painfully sucked into my lungs, taking some of the plaster dust in with the gust.
Hands roughly grab my ankles, and I’m slung like a rag doll into the next wall, sending a spray of glass up into the air again. The hands don’t release me, as I cry out in surprise, pain shooting up my side as my whole body is jarred by the unrelenting, steel wall behind the mirrors.
Another cry is ripped out of me when I’m slammed into the bed, crashing with it to the ground from the powerful hit. The mattress bursts from the explosive impact, and I hear the crack of the ground beneath us as an angry scream shouts in the air.
“You’re stupid!” a woman’s raspy voice shouts. “It hurts when you’re stupid!”
The world spins around me before I realize I’ve been thrown, and I once again slam into the unrelenting, thick steel that layers the wall to the outside. A crunch accompanies the pain searing in my jaw, the bones breaking so badly that I don’t get the chance to even speak.
“They want you! You too stubborn! This will be nothing compared to what she’ll do to you if you don’t take them!” the angry woman shouts again, just as a powerful foot collides with my middle.
The pain is so staggering that dots speckle my vision, and two fierce fists pound into my skull against the steel portion of the floor. Copper tinges my mouth, as the voice shouts something else, but my hearing dissipates with each new hit and shouted demand.
“You have everything! Don’t throw it away! Take them! You stupid girl! Take them!”
The voice sounds so far away, as the steady thrumming of my rapidly descending heartbeat hammers in my ears like a dreaded warning.
No. No. No—
I come to, my eyes blinking, pain screaming through every muscle and bone in my body, as I stare eye to eye with a familiar woman I have pinned under me on the ground.
She’s sobbing, as she shakes uncontrollably under me, and a long string of blood drips from my mouth, landing beside her face.
My hand is around her throat, and bruises are forming under my fingers. I’m straddling her waist, and my other hand is on the steel. It’s a fist. A fist that has bent the steel Taylor swore couldn’t be bent, even if Emit’s wolf had a tantrum.
I swallow thickly as my hands begin to shake. Caroline. This is Caroline I’m pinning down. It’s Caroline who attacked me.
She’s the one who always whispers to me through the walls…
I’d speak, but my jaw is still hanging precariously disjointed, hurting so much that fresh tears spill from my eyes.
“I’m sorry!” she wails, sobbing harder as her eyes screw shut. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
She starts slapping the side of her head, as I stumble off her, falling to the ground on my ass, as I struggle to catch a breath of air that doesn’t hurt, wincing as I thank good fortune she wasn’t just ripped apart by my monster.
I lost control of my monster that miraculously didn’t stay in control long. But that doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters.
I. Lost. Control. In my own House.
Caroline hurriedly scrambles into the walls, rushing through the one she put a hole in.
“I told you not to build the wall tunnels around your room. That’s just weird,” Anna says with her shit timing.
At my glare, she whistles awkwardly and disappears from sight.
My tears fall harder, and I cry out in pain as I slip up on the wall, fumbling with my broken bedside table for a healing potion, but the vials have all been shattered.