Page 165 of Priest and his Anarchist

I release a steady breath, slowly shuffling her to the corner of the room while unclipping my leather jacket. I place it over her semi-naked body, leaving me in a tight long-sleeve black sheer top.

I turn back to Corbin, my movements slow.Madison is alive. “What is this?”

“Well…you see…this is Aspen, Darling. Don’t you remember now?” I squeeze my eyes closed, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands when anger surges through my blood.

“Why!” I don’t know if there really are people in the audience, but I don’t care. If they paid to watch, they’ll be dead soon too. “You had her. You took her and left me in there! Why!” It doesn’t make sense. I don’t remember much of my childhood since all it was was running through the tunnels on my trike and answering to a higher power.

My skin prickles as if a thousand spiders crawled all over.

“If you think they’re going to save you, they’re not…and can’t, Darling. No one exits or enters without my access. Why won’t you come back to me? Why did you make us do something so dramatic? You’ve upset the Minister, you know—” His steps are chaotic, no rhyme or reason. “We’ve not seen him in quite some time! But this—this will appease him enough to bring him back.” His eyes move over my shoulder. “Kill Madison.”

He’s using her name to taunt me, or he thinks I am Darling, and I’ve switched. If he thinks Darling could switch, he was mistaken. That bitch was as evil as they come.

“No!” I scream, putting myself between him and Madison. “No…” I soften my tone. “You’ve got me.” I need to try another tactic. This is not going to work. “You’ve got me—you don’t need to take her to prove anything, the Minister—” I pause. “Danny will not want her, you know that. He wants me, remember? Just me!”

“Hmmm…” the Top Hat muses. I can’t bear to call him Corbin. “You were awfully hard to get to. He sure made it difficult. He doesn’t much like when things are flipped around, does he?” He starts pace-walking back and forward, and the man watches him carefully, as if a ticking time bomb ready to explode. “Where is the Minister? Why is he not coming!”

“You don’t need to hurt her. You have me now…”

Priest killed her, he kept me, but we haven’t had the discussion yet.

Is Corbin confused with which one of us Priest loves? Does he mean to kill her? We still haven’t spoken in detail about what happened on that day. Is this why? Is this why he is still mad, because he hates that it wasn’t me who died?

Jesus. That question is going to haunt me forever.

Doubt fills the wires of my brain. It’s ridiculous that I’ve found this exact inconvenient moment to have this crisis, but now I’m second-guessing everything I know. I assumed he didn’t know about her. That he always thought I split like they all had for so long and that he only just figured it out the day that he killed her. He locked me away so no one could find me, but I didn’t see him. Not the entire two weeks that passed after he killed her. I am in love with a man who not only isn’t capable of love, but what little part he has inside of him, he had for her, because it all boils down to that one simple thing.

He knew her first.

“We will get his attention.” He rests against a stray metal table.

I stand my ground. “I’ll do whatever you want. They don’t want me anyway. I’m a hurdle in their world.” The words are like poison, but I can’t help how honest they feel.

“Lie!” Corbin flies forward, his eyes flicking between me and Madison. Unease slips into my bones.

“Corbin, what happened to you?” At the mention of my friend’s name, he turns slowly, his steps gaining closer to Madison. “If you so much as breathe too close to her while I’m here, I will kill you before you can lift that cane…” I warn, my chest brushing him. “And I don’t know if you know this, but I am not the mute child you swapped for her all those years ago.”

Pride overrides his shock when he smiles up at me. Obviously not wanting to touch on my statement yet. “Still in the face of this, you protect a King? Even when you came back to me, after all those years, you protect him!” His laughter is like nails on a chalkboard. “So fucking predictable, Luna! No one liked you. No one! I did! I liked you! But no…never enough. The time I put into you to get you here was useless. For nothing. We needed you!” He steps closer. “You owed us that, because it was you who took him!”

“Took—that wasn’t me!” My arms fly around the room. “That was Darling!”

“You’ll still protect a King…” he whispers, ignoring my words. It’s useless trying to get him to see reason. He’s too far gone. A master of acts, his life is the biggest show of all.

“Always,” I answer, flexing my fingers. “Because even if they didn’t want me, I needed them.”

“Him,” Corbin corrects, testing me with a curved brow. “Admit your feelings and I’ll let the woman leave. I’ll have her dumped up in the hills of Colorado.”

“Why?” I ask, confused. “Why does it matter how I feel about him?”

“It matters because I’m curious.”

To think I let this man kiss me. Put his hands on me.

“Yes,” I hiss. “I want him. All of him. The ugly parts even more so, because?—”

“Because?” he asks, his eyes beaming with excitement.

Sweat slides down the nape of my neck.

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