Page 108 of His Pretty Little Duet

A survivor.

I fight it, oxygen-deprived and willingly losing consciousness, but then the water changes, pushes me up, and I'm dragged from the pool's hold.

Dragged into the air.

My flesh ignites again.

I fight to get back into the water where I don't hate the feel of my own skin. I fight in the arms around me, slapping his face and beating my fists into a wall of muscles.Don't fuckingtouch me."Don't touch me! Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" Screaming, I savagely attack him, scratching the plane of his handsome face, his soaking wet shirt, ripping the scene apart, fighting back. I'm fighting back.

He grabs my wrists, singeing my skin within his palms. "It's me, little deer."

I release a long, throaty cry, "You're burning me!"

Don't touch me.The voice in my head from that day, the one they couldn't hear, the one that froze in fear on my tongue, howls in my mind.

Don't touch me.

Don't touch me.

Don't touch me.

I'm suddenly dragged to the floor, smothered in him, locked against him. "Stop, Fawn! You're going to hurt yourself." He's suffocating me. A snake made with scorching human flesh. My skin bubbles. But then his lips hit my temple, his voice saying, "Shhh."

His hushing timbre soars through the grunting, the chanting, the little voice, the groans, through all the fear reaching me somewhere inside. Bringing with it the memories of the past few weeks while I have been his.

Mine!

The gun to Lee's face.

The way people part for him.

The deadliest man in the city.

The man who lied to me.

Protected me.

"Shhh."

It goes deadly quiet in my mind. The burning stops to the sound of him, and I go limp to his deep perpetual white noise. "They can't touch you. You're mine. You're mine."

I'm his.

My knees collapse, my body a decaying mess he supports in his arms. And I let go. Cry. I cry so hard my brain seems to detonate, bashing at my skull under the pressure of my violent sobs, of my racketing mind. I cry for every night between that one and this, becoming nothing but a vessel for every unshed tear. He holds the tattered pieces of me. He doesn’t press for answers.Who gave it to you? What did they say?He doesn't ask me what he can do or what hurts...

He knows the answers.

Nothing.

Andeverything.

Fawn

Curledon my side inhisbed, with my knees up to my chest and my cheeks tight with tracks of tears, my body trembles like a pebble.

Clay's arms are banding my legs, pinning the little ball of my body to his. His fists are clenched, working, the sound of his knuckles cracking under the pressure, not unlike a direct promise of carnage.

Clay...

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