Page 27 of Vicious Little Princess

I could no longer speak or make a sound as he choked me with his awful grip.

Twisting away and bucking didn’t help either. He just followed where my body turned.

A violent thud sounded and then a ferocious roar tore through the room a moment before my father’s arm was forcibly wrenched away from my throat. He screamed as a crack sounded, before he was ripped off me entirely.

Trembling, it took me some time to turn around, and when I did, I saw Milo on him, beating on him brutally, his hits coming hard and fast and absolutely mercilessly, while my father couldn’t defend himself at all.

A sick satisfaction betook me at the sight of him being dominated like that and utterly destroyed by a force more powerful than him.

“Milo!” Nico’s voice came a moment before he burst into my room also, then ran to him. “Not here. It can’t be here. Pull back. Just for now, I promise.”

With another roar, Milo smashed my father’s face into the carpet and knocked him out cold.

Then he turned to me, so much pain in his eyes as he looked me over. “Sunshine,” he uttered on a broken whisper.

I slumped onto the bed and hunched over, hanging my head. “Jesus Christ,” I choked, burying my face in my hands.

The trembling just wouldn’t stop.

I felt angry, sick, and ashamed all at the same time.

Arms wrapped around me and I heard Milo and Nico’s voices like lifelines in the face of the storm that was threatening to drag me into the undertow and away into its black abyss.

“Areyou sure you want to be a part of this?” Milo asked me as we stood outside the abandoned warehouse that Nico had driven us to in his Ferrari. “It’s gonna happen either way. Your participation doesn’t need to occur for this to end, all right? There’s no pressure at all.”

He didn’t want me to be a part of it. That much was clear.

Before I could answer, Nico strode out from the warehouse.

The blood staining his hands was the first thing I noticed. As he drew closer under the lights beaming down over the parking lot, I saw his face was splattered with it.

He was dressed all in black, but not in his usual stylish way. Just a pair of baggy black jeans and a hoodie on. Milo was also similarly dressed, just wearing black tactical pants instead of jeans. And he’d advised me to come in all black as well. I had my riding leathers on.

“All right, he’s ready,” Nico told us. He looked at me. “To be clear, you do this and you become complicit, J. It will also bind us together in an irrevocable way. I know you want to be closer to us and you’ve asked to be part of this side of our lives before, the dark and dirty of it, but you need to know that there’s no going back after this. Not just with us, but for you in a very personal way. To Milo and I, you’re already joined with us, no matter what. So don’t do this for that reason. Honestly, I don’t want you doing it at all. But I also understand if you feel like you need to. If that’s what you believe you need to purge those demons that the sick bastard in there created in you.”

“A compromise would be if you just watched,” Milo offered. “Let Nico and I take it.”

“I need to see him.” It was all I knew right now as the weight of their words took time to be absorbed as I struggled with it.

“Yeah,” Nico said. “Follow me.”

And I did, with Milo at my side, as we trailed after him into the warehouse.

The place was completely empty of whatever it had been used for before, so I saw my father right away in the center of the large space. He was bound to a chair, the legs which were screwed into the concrete.

Blood stained the path all around him.

His head was bowed, and he was shaking.

I took in his hands that looked… wrong.

“All his fingers are broken,” Nico informed me when he saw me looking.

“He used those hands to touch, torment, and hurt you,” Milo spat.

As we drew closer, I heard my father wheezing.

“A couple of ribs too,” Nico told me.

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