Page 6 of Red Flag Bull

I look her over. “Was that a joke? Because you’re stealing the color to paint happiness?”

She smiles a little and shakes her head. “Coincidence.”

“You know what else is coincidence?” I step closer again.

She doesn’t move away, and shows me no fear as she raises her chin. “What?”

“How badly we both want things to be different.” I slowly run my fingers through her hair, and then fist her long locks tightly at the base of her skull, until she angles her head where I want it with a pained hiss. “Make better choices,” I growl in her ear, “or you’ll attract the wrong things into your life.”

“Like I’ve attracted you?” she whispers.

“Maybe.” I twist my other hand in her cropped tee, until my knuckles brush against the soft undersides of her breasts. “Or maybe I’m the only thing right, Princess.” I let her go and straighten her clothes while she stands still and lets me. “Run along and do what you can to make the pencil children happy, Mandi. Maybe one day you’ll be one of them.”

3

MANDI

Jason King is six years older than me. He’s bigger, stronger, and just as mad at the world as I am.

He wears his blond hair shorn short, and his beard wilder and more dangerous. The combination sparks my genuine interest in a way that makes me feel awake in a world of sleepers, and coupled with the threatening authority that radiates from his deep, rumbling voice and harsh gaze, I’m hooked.

His angry grip was enough to choke me one-handed, and the power he could wield over me should have scared me, but it lit a fire inside me, instead.

I want more, but I don’t know how to get it.

He let me off with a warning the first time we met, and he made it seem like he cared, but he’s been keeping his distance ever since. Every time I look his way, hoping he’ll return my smile, he turns his back. And maybe I’m used to that kind of reaction from people I want to notice me, but for some reason, it hurts more when he does it.

He made me feel seen for a moment, but now I’m invisible again. I’ve been desperate to feel as important as I did that night, but he’s clearly not interested.

And why would he be? I’m pointless. I don’t even know why I exist, and lately, I’ve been spending too much time thinking that maybe I shouldn’t.

So I’m drunk.

Drunk enough to feel comfortably numb.

But not so drunk I can’t sense the danger I’m in when the boys fighting over me turn feral.

I’ve trained them to think I’m nothing but a fuckable prize, but from the panic rising through my inebriated haze of thoughts, I know I don’t want to be. The winner of their bloodlust-induced brawl will come to claim his right to my body — he’ll turn his wildly inflamed aggression on me, and the sex will be ugly. Violent.

This isn’t the way I want to die. And that’s motivation to want to live long enough to choose differently.

One thought enters my mind and refuses to leave. A voice, really. His voice.

Make better choices.

It’s a command, more than a suggestion, and the urge to obey it sobers me enough to climb off my fallen-log perch and stand.

The choice I have is to stay, or to go, and I know which was best.

I stumble through the woods, to where we’d parked on the old dirt road. I search the trucks for keys, find some, and get behind the wheel.

The door is ripped open before I fit the key in the ignition. I’m pulled roughly to the dirty ground and pinned by the bulk of a muscular man.

It’s happening. They followed me. The brawl is over, and I’m about to be claimed by the out-of-control victor.

I fight.

And my captor hums, like he’s enjoying the battle. “Keep it up, Princess. Make it hard for me, and I’ll punish you twice as bad.”

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