Brutal Precious (Lovely Vicious #3) (28 page)

“You never loved me,” I say hoarsely. “And I hated it.”

“You hate me,” He grins, maniacal. “You’ll always hate me.”

“No.” I stand, and sigh. “I feel sorry for you.”

It happens so fast I lose my footing and fall – Will lunges for me and pins me to the ground with his knees. Fear streams down my back, my spine, my face, like the ice-cold claws of a dread monster made of razors.

“Get off!” I scream. “GET THE FUCK OFF ME!”

“You think you’re better than me?” He sneers, spittle landing in my eyes. He grabs my flailing wrists and pins them to the floor, too. “You think you’ve got the fucking right to feel sorry for me? I’ll show you sorry. I’ll make you more sorry than you ever wanted –”

I spit in his face. It hits him on the eyebrow and drips down, and he looks horrified for a split second before he knees me hard in the ribs. I cry outand I try to squirm away, try to kick him and punch him but there’s nothing to kick and punch with, everything is weighed down by a heavy, furious weight.

It’s going to happen again.

It’s going to happen again.

It’s going to happen again and I can’t stop it.

No.

NO.

I can! I can stop this. I have to stop this once and for fucking all!

I twist my body around and kick hard, my foot meeting a soft bit of disgusting flesh between his legs, and Will wails and curls off me. It’s not a lot, his stubbornness clinging to my body, but it’s enough to give me the leverage I need to kick him off like the leech he is and race for the lightswitch.

“No!” He shrieks, the room flooding with total darkness. The only light is the faint streetlight from the window, and he scrabbles to sit on his bed and directly in that little square.

“You bitch!” Will snaps, shivering. “You fucking cunt! I’ll kill you when I find you. I-If you get near me I’ll fucking
kill
you!”

I stay low, like a panther. The tables have turned. I’m the predator, the wild thing in the darkness to haunt his nightmares. I have the power, and I’m drunk on it, seething with a smile that can barely contain my laugh.

“You’re pathetic,” I say. Will immediately lunges for my voice, but I sidestep him and when his fingers touch emptiness he recoils back into the light.

“You’re a disgusting human being.”

I sidestep again, farther back, and he swipes wildly at nothingness.

“Fuck you!” He screams.

“I pity you because you’ll never know what it’s like to be loved,” I laugh, dark and hoarse. “Your daddy never taught you. He taught you the opposite. And with that nasty attitude, no one in the world is going to try to teach you otherwise.”

“Shut up! Shut your whore mouth!”

“You’re going to rot forever inside yourself,” I whisper. “You’re going to be afraid of the darkness forever, the real darkness, the dark inside you. It’s there forever. And no one will ever care about you enough to try and pull it out. You will never care about yourself enough to try and pull it out.”

Will’s face crumples in the dimness, and I smile.

“I pity you, Will Cavanaugh.”

The door behind me slams open, light flooding in from the hallway. Jack, breathless and furious, tumbles into the room, takes one look at the situation, and strides over to me, holding me in his arms.

“Did he touch you?” He cups my face, looking it over with all the gentle intent of a doctor.

“No,” I smile up at him. “Not for long, anyway.”

Jack tenses, eyes solidifying to the most subzero temperatures I’ve seen yet. The room itself seems to go cold as he fixes his twin icebergs on Will. Will’s eyes dart around, focusing on the exit behind us, and he musters up a mad dash but never quite makes it, because Jack’s legs trip his and in two seconds he has Will pinned to the ground, his arm twisted behind him and his cries echoing.

“Fuck! Fuck you, you fucking bastard! Let me go!”

Jack looks up, and stands on Will’s arm, using Will as a footstool to reach the light on the ceiling. He pulls the bulb out, throwing it against wall. It splinters in fragments of glass.

“Isis,” Jack says calmly. “The lamp.”

I oblige, stepping over Will and maybe dragging my foot a little so it hits his face. He swears, but he swears harder when I yank the lamp out by the cord. I’m about to throw it at the wall when Jack stops me.

“No. The bed. I’ll hold him. Use the cord and tie him to it.”

“No! Shit, shit, fuck, no! You can’t do this! You can’t fucking do this to me! Isis, don’t let him do this!”

I ignore his teary pleas as Jack fixes his arms around the iron bedpost sunk into the floor. I tie the cord twice, and Jack ties it a third time, yanking it to check the tightness.

“It should be about seven hours until sunrise,” Jack says. “And I’m sure we can persuade your roommate to spend the night somewhere else. Somewhere…quieter.”

“The window,” I say casually. “It should be covered.”

“NO!”

“You know, it really should,” Jack agrees, smiling as he pulls the comforter from the bed and throws it over the window’s curtain rod, blocking out all the light from outside.

“Isis! I-Isis please!” Will pants, tears and snot dripping down his nose. “You can’t do this! I liked you! I cared about you –”

Jack punches him so hard I hear the crack of bone. He leans in, grabbing Will’s collar and sneering in his face.

“You will
never
speak to Isis again.”

“Isis! Plea-”

I turn away just in time to avoid seeing the second punch. But then I look back, because I deserve that much. His bloody nose drips down his chin and mouth, and he pants, a thin sheen of sweat over his terrified face as Jack and I retreat.

“The joke’s on you, Will,” I laugh. “The keylog you crushed was a fake I made from a soda bottle. I can’t believe you thought I was stupid enough to only have one. I planted the real one when you locked the door, when we first walked in. And now you’re fucked. Really, really fucked.”

“NO! NO!”

“Ah, the noise,” Jack says. He rummages through a nearby dresser and pulls out a shirt, handing it to me. “Should I do the honors?”

“I will,” I say. I rip the flimsy cotton down the middle and walk up to the pathetic boy I used to love. Will whimpers, the threat of another punch keeping him from speaking.

“Tell me why,” I say, squatting at his level. “Why did you rape me?”

Will looks to Jack, who just nods. Will tries a smile.

“B-Because, Isis! I liked you!”

He struggles weakly as I force the cloth in his mouth. Not his throat, because I don’t want to kill him. I thought I did, but I really don’t. I want him to live. To suffer like I did.

I walk back to Jack, Will’s muffled screaming the last thing I hear before I shut the door.
  

***

Diana and Yvette find Will’s roommate, a mousy boy with big glasses, and tell him what’s happened. He sighs in relief, saying he hates Will, and god bless us for fucking him over. He stays in Diana’s dorm, and they, curiously, stay with him. But I’m too exhausted to be very curious for very long about it.

Jack helps me into my room, and collapses on the bed with me.

And I cry, and he strokes my face and my arms and cries with me.

2 Years

29 Weeks

3 Days

I’ve decided the sun is out to end me.

A lot of things are out to end me – cancer, teletubbies, general death. But out of all of the dire and dangerous things in this world, the sun has to be the worst of them. It grows our food and keeps us warm in the vast infinite cradle of space-time, so it forces us into the illusion we should be grateful for it, when in fact it is very hard to be grateful to anything blinding your eyes with a cheerful sawblade of ultraviolet rays.

“Ugh,” I roll over on my beach towel. “Can you cool it for, like, five seconds?”

The sun brightly declines. I sip my Barbie-colored fruity drink from a fancy glass and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Where the heckle –” My hands scrabble for my sunglasses, and I shove them on my face. “Ahh, temporary relief. So sweet, so transient, so Gucci.”

“Mademoiselle!” A voice rings out. I groan and sit up, watching Gregory waddle his way through the sands towards me. Even the southern French villagers, used to bright and colorful Mediterranean clothing, stare at his atrocious green-and-orange Hawaiian shirt.

“Gregory, you’re an eyesore,” I complain. Gregory laughs and offers me a hand up, his eyes taking in my white swimsuit with the low-cut back.

“And you, madame, are quite the opposite.”

“No!” I protest as I stand up. “No no no, look at these thighs! I’m far too young to be a madame. Try again in like, a seven thousand years.”

He chuckles. “Very well. Come on, he sent me to fetch you and for some reason he’s antsy as fuck-all.”

“Antsy?
Jack
?” I quirk a brow, picking up my towel and drink and slipping on my sandals, trudging through the sands with Gregory. “Are we talking about the same human being I’m in regular personal contact with?”

“The one and only.”

“Are you taking him back with you? Please say yes,
please
! I want those amazing little chocolates from Paris again - I want them with all my crappy idiot heart.”

“God knows you deserve them, putting up with him all the time,” Gregory huffs. “He’s been so off-kilter lately. After that last case, I told him to stay home, but it’s only made him worse.”

“He needs to get out,” I assert. “Put him on a nice case, something that has to do with saving the world or at least, like, non-fatal revenge. That’s his specialty. He’ll love it and I’ll love you for it and my love is, frankly, the most important thing you should be bargaining for here besides oxygen.”

“And French ladies,” Gregory eyes a village woman who passes in a short skirt.

“We have the crème de la crème here,” I agree, and wave at the villagers. “Bonjour! Francois! La bouche un petite chienne! Oh dear, they don’t look happy about that last one.”

“That last one didn’t even make
sense
,” Gregory emphasizes, and makes little ‘pardon’ noises at the offended nearby villagers. I walk briskly past him and up the cobblestone road. The village is tiny – white-washed, cramped store fronts housing
 
bakeries and butcher shops and candy stores on the street level, and houses on the second level, windowboxes spilling with fresh herbs and flowers. Lines of laundry are thrown between windows, sheets and shirts flapping in the summer breeze. The smell of the ocean is everywhere, children carrying boogeyboards and floats bob and weave between bikes and too-slow couples. A pair of old men in stodgy caps take turns playing chess and drinking wine under the eaves of a flower shop.

Towards the edge of the village the cobblestone fades, replaced with a well-worn dirt road. Tall summer grasses sway on either side. I scoop up yellow and purple and white wildflowers, a honeybee fighting me for a particularly beautiful orange blossom.

“Go on!” I shoo her. “There are a thousand more, you can afford to donate one to the poor humans!”

Gregory chuckles, looking out at the ocean and the small farmhouses we pass.

“I’ll miss this town. You two’ve picked the best place in the world to settle down, I reckon.”

“Hey! No one’s settled! We’re going to Cambodia next year, and we went to Greece this spring! This is home base, not a settlement.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Settlement means like, minivans and baby barf. Home base implies we are
explorers
of the
highest caliber
.”

Gregory shakes his head. “Still, this place is fantastic.”

“Oh yeah, it’s great. Fresh honey and bread and lots of fruit in the fall, and I can’t speak a word of French but at least my boyfriend can.” I smack my lips. “Boyfriend. Ugh, that word
still
tastes funny. There should be another word. Prince, maybe? No, that’s too regal. Significant other? Ugh, too suburban. Buttbear?”

I pause, then turn to Gregory.

“I think I’ve struck
gold
.”

“Buttbear sounds like a carebear,” He sighs.

“Exactly!”

Gregory and I walk in silence, me skipping and him sticking to the shade of the oak trees. Another farmhouse passes, all white stone and logs and dogs chasing goats around.

“Will gets his parole hearing today,” Gregory tries. My heart stiffens a little, but the warm air is too sweet for it to last for long.

“Yeah. I heard.”