Page 74 of Incipient

Frenzied laughter burst out of me as though I’d completely lost touch with reality. “You think I wantyou?” I scoffed, refusing to let him know that the pain he was causing me was anything more than skin deep. “You think I spend even a second of the day thinking about you?”

“Has Romeo managed tofuckme out of you already?” He clicked his tongue in disappointment.

“You make me sick,” I said and then spit in his face.

Stone-cold eyes pierced my soul. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” he purred and then licked my spit from around his mouth, slow and deliberate, like he was enjoying the taste. “I suppose we’ll just have to see what we can do about fixing that then, won’t we?” he said and then released my hands.

For a second, I was confused thinking that maybe he was going to let me go; that maybe he’d had enoughfunfor the night. Instead, he brought his hands to my chest, grabbed the seam of my blouse and then ripped it wide open.

Ice-cold realization hit me as I watched the buttons scatter all over the forest floor.

“Dominic, please—don’t do this,” I begged, my voice bordering around hysterical as I pushed at his chest and dug my heels into the ground, trying to dislodge myself from his weight. “You’re going to regret this. This isn’t you. You love me!” I cried out in desperation, trying to remind him of who he was; of what we were.

He froze for a moment and then shook his head as though he were dispersing a haze of smoke from his mind. “You’re right.”

“What?” My chin quivered as I looked up at his through glassy eyes.

“I do love you, and my goodness, this isn’t me.”

My heart came to a complete stop. Was he remembering? Were his emotions slowly coming back to him? Had I finally breached that impossible wall that had been erected around the heart of the man I had loved and craved so vigorously?

An evil grin spread across his face. “You’re as gullible as you are tasty.”

“Dominic!” My scream echoed through the deserted forest as he bared his teeth and then drove his face down into my neck, his teeth ripping into my flesh without the faintest semblance of mercy.

A throbbing, searing pain exploded from my neck and then radiated outward, touching every part of my body as though I had invited it to. Within seconds, his venom was in my system, burning through my bloodstream like a wildfire as my panic and will to fight hopelessly melted away from me, my treacherous body betraying me once again.

I vaguely remembered thinking he was probably going to rape me, or drain me, or possibly worse, but even those thoughts slipped away as I lay there motionless and placid, his pretty poison racing its way through my system and once again filling me with that unappeasable darkness that I both loved and hated in equal parts.

29. NOTHING BREAKS LIKE A HEART

It hadn’t taken very long for my will to fight him off to completely evaporate. Even as I listened to the sounds of blood oozing and fabric ripping, both were just fleeting thoughts that passed through my brain as quickly as they had entered. The bite was doing exactly what it was designed to do—what it always did—but inside, I was screaming out for help.

Inside, I was slowly dying at the hands of the man I once loved.

My gaze focused in on a sliver of moonlight peeking out from between the towering trees, silently wishing that my consciousness would leave me soon enough. I didn’t want to face what he was doing to me—what he was going to do. I wanted to disappear inward to that place I so often hid and feel nothing but the ecstasy of his numbing prison.

The faint sound of rustling branches caught my attention as swells of poisonous pleasure rolled over my body in paralyzing waves. I imagined a little forest critter watching the scene unfold from the bushes before scurrying to safety—far away from the dangerous predator that was now hunting these grounds.

A vague feeling of my skirt being bunched up around my hips had gently tapped against my subconscious, asking me to look; to acknowledge the monster before me, but I firmly slammed the door shut.

Blackness peppered my vision as my eyes rolled back, the world around me slowly fading into nonsentience. I welcomed it, as I had so many times before, but this time for a completely different reason. I didn’t want to sink into Dominic, to fade into his secret place where nothing hurt, and nothing mattered.

This time, I wanted to fadeawayfrom him.

Another rustle sounded from the bushes, followed by the sound of shoes slapping against the packed forest floor. The cold air brushed against my naked chest, jolting my eyes open to the sky and outline of trees. Dominic was nowhere in sight. A strange commotion of noise and grunts drew my attention from the sky. Weak and disoriented, I rolled my head to the left and squinted through the watery blur.

Two forms were hurling over each other in the mess of dirt and crunchy leaves, arms flailing and fists swinging, though I couldn’t make out anything more than that. The only thing that registered in that moment was that someonehadcome—someone had knocked Dominic off of me and was now fighting to subdue him.

Digging deep inside, I pulled together every last morsel of my strength I had left and somehow managed to drag my semi-paralyzed body backward until I was resting against a tree. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I peered harder at the two forms until my eyes could make sense of what I was seeing.

Gabriel.

A strange whimper of relief passed from my lips and Gabriel snapped his head in my direction. The brief distraction had given Dominic an opening to wrap his forearm around Gabriel’s neck and then body slam him into the ground. Dominic scrambled backward, putting some distance between the two as his biting laughter rang out around us.

“Fancy seeing you out here, brother,” panted Dominic as he wiped my blood from the corner of his mouth. “Let me guess. You were out hunting your dinner?”

Gabriel slowly lifted himself from the ground and then straightened to his full height. His sharp, lethal gaze never moving from Dominic.

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