He rubbed his jawline. “Do you hate me, Celeste?”
My eyebrows shot up. The question had come as a shock to me. “I….” I faltered, unsure what to say. “No,” I finally ventured.
He stared at the wall, then looked back at me. “The other day you said you would rather be dead than be here.”
Guilt roiled in my guts. “I didn’t mean that, sir,” I mumbled. It was the truth. I didn’t want to die under any circumstances. It was just something I said in the heat of the moment.
Alex nodded. “Good. Because I can’t let you go.”
Pain pricked at my upper back as he spoke. My nerve issue was bothering me more and more nowadays, even after the short reprieve I had from it when I watched Baldwin die screaming and choking on his own blood the other day.
I knew why the pain had returned. It was from the stress and shame of displeasing Alex recently. I wanted to hate him for what he’d done to me, and what he was probably going to do to me soon, but I still faced the same problem I always had. I simply couldn’t hate him. Every time I saw his face, I was reminded of it, and now I knew exactly why.
The stark realization had hit me somewhere around lunchtime three days ago. I wasn’t falling for Alex anymore. I’d already fallen for him. Fallen so hard that I couldn’t bring myself to hate him even though he was a monster.
He would probably kill me soon, just like he did to the last girl, but even then I couldn’t hate him. Even if I had managed to escape the other day, part of me would’ve wanted to come crawling back, begging for his forgiveness. Part of my heart would’ve been ripped out, left right here with Alex.
It was utterly senseless, tore my soul in two, broke my fragile heart into pieces, threatened to devour me whole… but I loved him.
I was in love with a monster.