I don’t realize how hard I’ve been gripping the copper downspout of the building I’m lurking behind until it starts to bend beneath my fingers.
“I know you're still thinking about that night. Aboutme. That's why you're still here talking to me.”
Kyle smiles coldly at her, shaking his head at her silence.
Herpatheticsilence.
“Don’t come here looking for me again, Yelena,” he sighs. “You and I have nothing more to talk about, and this conversation is over.”
He turns and walks away.
She just stands there, her whole body caved in on itself.
A shadow under the dim glow of a lonely streetlight.
I stand there a moment longer, watching her.
Throbbing from the wrath swirling in my veins.
She still wants him.
For a fraction of a second, it’s almost enough to make me turn my back on whatever this is that I’ve started to engage in with her andwalk away.
But then I remember I’m a motherfuckingDrakos.
Idon’twalk away. I don’t retreat.
I fucking conquer, pillage, burn, andsubjugate, like a goddamn King.
Fuck Kyle. Fuck her, too. But mostly fuck whatever she thinks she still wants with that motherfucker.
It’s over between them.
She’s already unequivocally, irreparably, irredeemablymine.
And I think it’s time to show her again exactly what that fucking means.
18
YELENA
At first,I just stood there stunned and frozen and unable to move when I realized the man walking around the corner of Elvira’s Café was fuckingKyle.
I’ve tried to push it out of my head that he’s still so close to Knightsblood. I’ve avoided even goingnearthat block where his satellite office is, just in case.
Honestly, I’ve avoided Hawthorne Hollow in general so far this semester because of that fucking monster. Which is another reason to hate him. I used to love coming down here with my friends and getting ice cream by the waterfront.
It’s that hate that had me blurting out “I haven’t forgotten what you did to me” and pulling his attention from his phone.
I could have…should have…just kept walking. He hadn’t even noticed me until I said that.
I’ve only crossed paths with the asshole once since it happened. It was two weeks afterward, and I finally forced myself to stop pretending I had a head cold and leave my room at my parents’house. I worked up my courage, went down to Kyle’s office in Manhattan, and marched into his private corner suite to tell him I was going to tell people what he did, and make sure he went to prison.
“For what?”
Those two words said with a sickly smooth smile were all it took to destroy my plans of vengeance.
After that, he ran what I know now is the abuser’s playbook.