Page 169 of Claiming Pretty

Seconds stretched into an eternity, my steady heartbeats filling the silence.

Then, with a sudden, jerky movement, she stabbed at the screen, opening the video file.

The sounds of Ebony’s pleasure filled the room.

I’d seen the video and so the sudden crack of a whip did not surprise me.

But Ebony’s cry of pain and demand for more was something I would be happy to not hear a third time.

The video Ciaran had uncovered was the dean’s own guarantee against the new High Lord.

Judging by the way Ebony’s face completely drained of blood as she watched it, she hadn’t known about the dean secretly filming them. Not that she could have done anything about it even if she had known.

She’d been in a room that was half boudoir, half torture chamber, bound and hanging from a complex contraption on the ceiling.

The dean wasn’t even undressed as he circled her and teased her naked body with the tail of the whip. The more she begged for it, the less he gave her.

His voice was tinny from the small cell phone speaker and it only reached me all the way across the room faintly, but it didn’t matter, because I remembered it word for word.

“Why doesn’t Daddy do this for you anymore?” he asked.

Even without the video in front of me, I could still see him circling the ropes, Ebony snagged within them, her welted body writhing for the sting of the whip.

I didn’t even blink when I heard Ebony’s response. “Because I killed him.”

The crack of the whip was nothing compared to the volume of Ebony’s cries of pleasure.

“Tell me again,” he hissed. “Whokilled the High Lord?”

Ebony’s response was near euphoric, the high-pitched cry of a woman on the edge of orgasm.

“Me, me,me!” she screamed, each answer punctuated by another brutal strike of the whip.

Ebony cut off the prolonged noise of her orgasm by turning off the phone.

Ebony’s breath caught audibly, her earlier composure shattered. She was white as a sheet.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head as if she could will the truth away. “You… you couldn’t… you wouldn’t send this to anyone, would you?”

I didn’t answer right away.

My mind wandered—to another recording. One I hadn’t shown her.

To a shadowed altar where her father stood duringhisinitiation.

And to a naked girl lying pale and still on the cold stone altar.

A girl with pale eyes the color ofHydrangea macrophylla.

The saddest thing of all was that Ebony had been a victim once, just like me.

And yet she had chosen to perpetuate the very system that had shattered her.

Instead of breaking the chains, she had tightened them around others, condemning victims who were as powerless as she had once been. She had taken the cruelty she’d suffered and wielded it like a weapon, carving out her own twisted sense of control.

There was no redemption for her. No undoing the horrors she had inflicted, no path to absolve the blood on her hands. The weight of that truth pressed down on my chest like a stone, heavy and unrelenting.

But for a fleeting moment—just one—I glimpsed her as she must have been before it all. A frightened little girl trapped in her own nightmare, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s sins.

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