Page 138 of Anathema Codex

I’ve given him a home. Gotten him off the smack. Hell, I let him experience me when the mood hits me and this is how he repays me?

Once we reach the door, I kick it open, then reach down for a fistful of his hair and force him to his feet.

He looks at me with those bloodshot eyes of his, tears streaming down his protruding cheekbones, and I smile.

“In you go,” I tell him cheerfully, giving him a shove toward the shower.

Nah. I don’t want to get rid of him.

This hole is mine.

SIX

Potholes on Memory Lane

ICHABOD

I barely manage to catch myself on the wall well enough to avoid ripping the shower curtain down, but maybe I shouldn't have bothered. If I yanked it down because he was pushing me around again there's a chance he might have been too fed up with the situation to keep bothering me.

Too late now.

"Go on. Shower time," he says, stepping into the bathroom to kick the back of my leg, which buckles my knee, but even though I close my fist on the shower curtain... I don't have the guts to tear it down.

Sniffling, I swipe at my running nose and toss the plastic aside, staring into the basin of the tub as I imagine all the different things I could do in this moment if I wasn't so fucking pathetic. I could kick him like he kicked me, or try to hit him with something, but he's bigger than me, more muscular—and way more experienced with violence.

I've always been on the receiving end of pain and suffering, not the one delivering it, and I feel another hiccuped sob rising in my chest as I think of the times Bea stood up for me. She put herself between me and suffering more than once... but she'll never do that again.

"I hate you," I whisper, my whole body trembling with a toxic combination of sorrow and rage that makes my voice break on a croak of pain when Lakyn suddenly rips my head back by my hair.

"You really think you hate me?" he purrs against my ear, and my stomach goes cold as the heat of his body scorches the thin layer of air between us. His chuckle rolls, resembling thunder behind me and I swear I can feel the vibration of it in my ribs, like a warning of a storm on the horizon—I just don't know if I want to survive it this time or not. "Come on, be honest. We both know you don't hate me, Ichabod. You loved me before I was even willing to let you touch my dick."

It wasn't love. It was lust.

I know the difference. I learned it the hard way when I was on the streets and desperate for money or food, and when I first saw Lakyn Meyer I felt lust, not love. He was beautiful, and I saw it the moment he opened Bea's door. Before I knew his name, before Hell opened up and dragged all three of us into a cursed destiny, I was jonesing for a hit, and I offered to suck him off for twenty dollars so I could make the pain stop, but he turned me down.

Instead, we met up with Beatrix and he fed me, flashing that devilish grin as he watched us interacting like we were some fascinating new species narrated by David Attenborough, and soon enough I was obsessed with him. Torn between disgust at some of the things he said to Bea, while being drawn in by the way his lips wrapped around a cigarette, or his muscles shifted as he hefted his hatchet.

I don't know why the murder didn't phase me the way it should have. Maybe I was always broken in a way similar to Bea and Lakyn. Maybe that's why she took pity on me. Maybe that's why he didn't kill me. And more than likely that's why I ended up on a road trip with them. A trip that never ended, that never brought me back to the shithole I called home with my horrible sister, and somehow in the whirlwind of sex and violence and death... Lakyn decided to keep me.

I didn't love him when I met him. I didn't even love him the first time he brutally fucked me in a hotel room... but somewhere along the line I did fall in love with him, and that's why I can't make my goddamn tongue work enough to argue.

Lakyn Meyer is still the most beautiful man I've ever seen. Definitely the hottest one I've ever been fucked by, and I think that helped a lot as I came to terms with trading my body in exchange for my life. But at some point over the last twenty or so years, it wasn't enough anymore.

I don't know if it's the lust that's worn off, or the love... but all I can feel right now is the pain of being with him.

"You know how much I hate it when you don't answer me." Lakyn wraps his hand around my throat, squeezing just enough to make my next inhale wheeze a little as the blood pounds behind my eyes. "Tell me the truth... do you hate me?"

I want to say yes. I imagine saying the word, the shape of it forming on my tongue, and then it dissolves. If I was a better person, a more decent person, I'd tell Lakyn to go fuck himself. I'd tell him I hate him, that he's a fucking bastard for hurting Bea and I'll never forgive him for it... but he always knows when I lie.

And I know I still feel for him despite how many times he's hurt me.

Despite him cutting Bea's head off her shoulders.

Even when he brought her fucking head back to me in a cooler like a present with a goddamn bow on it, fully expecting me to give him credit for keeping his promise.

All I've done in the days since is cry in bed, refusing to eat, or bathe, or talk to him. He could have fucked me, but he's never liked it when his fucktoy isn't an active participant—which is exactly why I've stayed limp and disgusting for as long as possible.

"Ichabod..." Lakyn's voice is a warning now, full of all the impending danger I heard in his false chuckle, and the moment I accept that I'll never be able to hold him accountable for what he's done—that I'm too weak, too well-trained, too pathetic to actually challenge him—I hate myself more than I could ever hate him.

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