Valen just stares at me as if he’s seeing a stranger wearing my skin.
This ain’t how I do it and he knows it. It’s not how I kill them—and definitely not how I fuck them. But this wasn’t that.
This was… mercy.
Because I knew if I’d walked away and left her breathing, he would’ve patched her up just enough to keep her going a little longer. Long enough for more days of brutal rape and horrific torture, dragging her through the filth of his world until there was nothing left but nerves and horror.
So maybe, just maybe… today, I’m feeling… nice.
As I step back, Valen’s stunned into silence for once, and I meet his gaze for a moment, just long enough, then turn and walk out.
But behind me, I hear his footsteps, quick and desperate, chasing the quiet I’ve left behind.
“Wrath…” he calls out, but I don’t slow down. I don’t wonna see his face. Don’t want to hear the fucking questions that I don’t even have the answers to.
As soon as I get outside of that suffocating house, I reach my bike and swing a leg over, my hands already moving like muscle memory. The engine roars to life beneath me, a savage growl in the quiet morning.
Valen catches up and stops beside me as I rev the throttle once more and I peer at him from the corner of my eye.
“What the fuck was that about?” he asks, voice tight, too many emotions crammed into just a few words. “I got you her as a gift… You… I… We’re…”
I glance away, blinking fast, too fast, trying to shake the pressure creeping under my skin. It’s always been me and him. He’s always looked at me like I was his—a son or a fucking weapon.
But not today. Today I choose my little corpse.
I don’t answer him. I don’t even look at him. I just yank the throttle like I’m trying to rip the engine out of its fucking cage. Then the tires shriek against the gravel, spitting stone and dust like shrapnel as I tear off.
Chapter Eleven
Aurelia
It’s early morning, and I’m training in the Cirque with Blush. She’s trying to teach me how to handle fire, but it’s damn near impossible when every instinct screams to run from it.
Heat was one of Zye’s favorite things—especially when he was using it on me. Burning and marking me. He said he liked how my skin melted and how my scream would sound. But I keep telling myself to push past it and that we’re done letting fear call the shots, no matter what kind of trauma it crawled out of.
Wrath’s wild ways last night made me realize something more than anything. Despite the terror he poured into my body, somehow, this morning, I woke up feeling… lighter. Not physically, but mentally. So fucking light I found myself second-guessing everything I am, wondering if I had some kind of strange kink because I wanted to be bound and broken at his will all over again.
I let it happen, and Iwantedit to happen. And the fact that Wrath, someone so unhinged and so far gone, bent his entire fucking mentality just to let me live and keep meas his… did something to me and I know that’s crazy.
I should have felt disgusted, furious, afraid and the guilt that would follow. And I didn’t. But that’s because I’ve been through worse. I’ve survived so much worse. Worse in a way where I didn’t feel any control and I fucking died at the hands of three ruthless men. But that’s the fucked-up part—last night didn’t feel like that night. Or any other time in my life. I didn’t feel like I was being abused and discarded.
When Wrath spat in my mouth, again and again, I should’ve screamed. I should’ve thrashed. I should’ve been filled with the kind of rage that used to keep me alive. Instead, I choked on it, heaved on it, letting the taste, thick and bitter, run down my throat like something deadly, but couldn’t get enough of.
Because some sick, broken part of me wanted to be violated by him.
He’s not gentle and he clearly doesn’t ask, but he also doesn’t pretend to love me or lie with soft words while hurting me like the others did.
No, Wrath is violence without apology. He takes and he takes, and somehow it feels more honest than anything I’ve ever known. There’s no illusion. No betrayal hiding behind a mask. What you see is what you fucking get.
It’s pain. It’s dominance. It’s wrong. But it’s real.
And while I was consumed by the depths of it, when my mouth was full of filth and my body was trembling, something inside me cracked—and not in the way I’m used to. It wasn’t another fracture. It was a shift. A return. Like a jagged piece of me had finally snapped back into place, crooked but solid.
I hate him for it. God, I fucking hate him for it. But I crave him even more.
He destroyed a part of me—but the right part of me. Teased the hell out my body and left me dangling on the edge by a thread, just enough to make me come crawling back.
He knew exactly what the fuck he was doing. Every movement and moment of control or cruelty was a calculated psychosis.