Page 60 of Fear Me, Love Me

Her heart’s desire is her brother.

A home.

My undying love and loyalty.

Vivienne gazes up at me with a confused expression, unable or unwilling to understand what I’m offering. Is it too much for her right now to contemplate their deaths? Fine. She’ll come around soon enough, when I’ve won all her heart and they’ve destroyed all her love for them.

“I’m sorry, Tyrant. I can’t ask you for anything. Last night you made a fifteen-year-old girl’s fantasy come true, but you and I…I can’t keep making one dangerous decision after the other. Everything can’t keep falling apart around me or I’ll fall apart too.”

“Vivienne, you didn’t do anything wrong. None of this is your fault.”

“Then why do these things keep happening to me?” she asks brokenly. “Please just let me go. I want to go home.”

I feel a thud of alarm. Vivienne is in so much pain right now and she wants to go back to her dorm so she can cut. Over my bleeding corpse is she going to sit alone in her room with a blade in her hands, crying as she slices herself up.

I push her against the door of the car, looming over her so she has to tilt her head right back to look me in the eyes. “There’s something you should know about me, Vivienne. I don’t give up when I want something. I will bend the world until it breaks and rearrange it the way I want it to be.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she says. “You can’t make me.”

Yes, I can, but if I force her to come with me, I’ll be the bad guy and the reason she’s never allowed to see Barlow. Vivienne needs to realize for herself that she’s never going to make those people happy, and then she’ll be all mine.

I stroke a finger under her chin. “You don’t have to go anywhere with me. I already own you.”

Vivienne’s eyes widen. “What?”

“You can go home, but you’re my property. I own every inch of you. No one hurts what’s mine, even you. I’m very fucking serious about that.”

“Wait, are you letting me go or not?”

I let out a dark laugh. “Letting you go? In Henson, where everything and everyone belongs to me? Where every person watching you from a car, a street corner, a bus stop, works for me? Angel, you’re not going to be more than ten feet from someone connected with me from now on.”

Thanks to the tracker I injected into the nape of her neck while she was asleep, I’ll always know where she is. God, it turned me on to do that, and seeing the tiny bump beneath her skin. I had to fuck her again right then, and I did. I thrust myself balls-deep inside her before she could wake up. Now, thanks to that tracker, I’m always inside her, and I can get to her in a heartbeat.

I won’t be telling her that, however. Vivienne would do something silly with her knife if she knew it was there.

“Don’t even think about leaving Henson. I can and will find you anywhere at any time. If you flee, I will drag you back here and punish you. You don’t leave Henson. That’s your first rule.”

Both her eyebrows shoot up. “I have rules?”

I’m not answering stupid questions. Of course she has rules.

“You go to class. You visit your brother. If you’re hurting, you call me. If you want to talk, you call me. If you need me to fuck you, you call me. Unlock your phone and give it to me.” I hold out my hand and wait.

“We won’t be needing to talk or fuck, thank you,” she tells me with a shake of her head.

“Unlock your phone and give it to me, or I will go to your house, steal Barlow, and we’ll do this all over again.”

“Dad has a gun.”

I laugh softly. “So do I, and I know how to use mine. Does he?”

She thinks about this for a moment, sighs, then takes out her phone, presses in the code, and hands it to me. I call my own phone, let it ring once, and then hang up and pass it back to her.

“Finally, the most important rule of all.” I take her shoulders in my hands and lean in close. “You’re only allowed to bleed for me, angel. You want to hurt and scream and suffer?” I brush my lips over hers. “I’ll make you suffer.”

Vivienne watches me through half-lidded eyes as if what I’ve just said is the most alluring thing she’s ever heard. She gazes at my mouth for a long time and then seems to come out of a trance and shakes herself off. She addresses Liam, who has been driving all this time and pretending not to listen to us. “Could you please take me to the dorms at Henson University?”

Liam meets my gaze in the rearview mirror, and I nod.

---