Page 51 of Corrupted Heart

She turns to leave again.

“What I think you are, Amaya,” I snarl, “is a fucking monster.”

“Takes one to know one, Kratos,” she shoots back. Then she grins. “And I guess that means you do still think of me.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Seeing anyone?”

My hands curl to fists. “Go to hell.”

She snickers quietly as she walks to the door. Right before she opens it, she turns to me again.

“To answer your question, Kratos, they don’t give a shit what I am, so long as I put people like you and your family behind bars. Remember that and do what you’re told like a good boy.” She smirks as she opens the door. “You always were good at that.”

10

BIANCA

Returning to reality is hard, once you’ve had that first tantalizing peek behind the curtain.

There’s an iconic scene in The Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo to choose between taking the red pill or the blue pill. The blue pill will erase all memory of the craziness he’s just witnessed and ease him back into his fake, comfortable life.

If he takes the red one, though, the veil will be lifted. He’ll, as Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus puts it, “see how deep the rabbit hole goes”.

In my case, I’ve taken the red pill, but life keeps trying to convince me I’ve taken the blue one.

No one in my real world knows what I’ve seen. What I’ve experienced.

What I’ve done.

Not my family, because obviously. Not my friends, either.

It’s been a week since that night. Since the huge, masked man with the punishing touch and the voice like sin vanished into the ether after chasing me through that church. Since he brought me to heights I’ve only fantasized about, only to disappear like smoke.

“This was a mistake, princess. I fucking warned you that you were way out past your fucking depth.”

After the rush and the madness of that chase, and the knife, and him brutalizing the most insane orgasm of my life from my body, I actually waited for him to come back. Seconds ticked by. Then minutes.

Finally I was forced to admit that he really was gone, and that I was alone in a creepy old boarded-up church, fuck-knows-where, without a phone, because he’d taken that, too.

When I’d poked my head outside, though, there was a black car waiting for me, with a driver in sunglasses who never responded to a single thing I said, but freakishly drove me right to my front door before handing me my phone.

Milena and Naomi both checked in with me the next morning to see how my “hangover” was. Madame Kuzmina’s made a comment here and there over the last week about me being “distracted”.

But no one knows the truth. No one knows that I’ve swallowed that red pill. And now I can’t see anything the same way.

I’m early to the theater today, so after changing and stretching a little, I sit in one of the empty seats ten or so rows back from the stage. I frown at the web tab on my phone that’s open to my Club Venom account.

No new messages from RaisedByWolves. Not a single peep. I mean it’s not like I’d expect an encounter like ours to merit a “hey I had a great time the other night” follow-up. It’s not like we went to the movies or shared a milkshake, for crying out loud.

But still. The absence of…anything…makes me feel almost hollow inside. Not quite put back together right. It’s not like I feel ditched or discarded—well, maybe a little. No, the thing is that this is the one other person on Earth who knows what I did that night. The one person who could maybe at least sort of understand what I’m feeling right now, after diving headfirst into my darkest fantasy.

And he’s gone. No messages, I haven’t even seen him online at all since that night.

He’s disappeared like a half-remembered fever dream. What’s even weirder is that I don’t have any messages or other chat requests at all.

I mean, I know my profile is a little bare bones, but still. I’m on a kink website advertising that I’m into primal play, and I don’t have a single response aside from him? I even went back and added to my profile, trying to see if that made a difference. I added my age. I elaborated on my kink. The other day, I even uploaded a picture of my ass in yoga pants.

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