The Rebirth of Sin (Wicked Trinity Book 2) (15 page)

“What are saying?” I chose my words carefully for a reason beyond anything I could immediately determine.

“We need to leave,” he replied, pushing an issue I thought we’d discussed and dismissed. “We’ll leave together and tell no one where we are. We’ll be who we were again.” He looked at Nadine and Adam. “All of us.”

With contempt, I shook my head at him, declining his unattractive offer. “You’ve been so brutal toward me lately. Why would you think I would say yes?”

“It’s the stress of being here,” he balked as if my concerns didn’t matter, “under your mother’s watchful fucking eye. It will change.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands over the table into prayer position. 

Nadine cleared her throat, garnering my direct attention. Her eyes were trained to Noah. Without directly regarding her, he nodded in acknowledgement of an unspoken conversation between the two of them. 

Noah ejected from his seat and sauntered toward me. He pulled my chair from the table and turned it around until I faced him. He brushed the back of his hand down my face and held me with a tenderness, exemplifying yet another gesture he would never have done previously. “I know what my problem is. Stress, plus the lack of the thrill of being with you. The thrill of being caught. The thrill of being watched.” He glanced at Adam and Nadine. “They aren’t here only to convince you of what I’ve been trying to get through your thick head. They are here…to be my audience while I give you what you know you really want.”

I couldn’t hide my apprehension nor my full out rejection of the idea. No words needed to be said. My silent reaction told Noah everything he needed to know.

“Don’t pretend the thought doesn’t make you a little wet, princess. I know it does.”

Shaking my head and feeling too many things at once to explain, I slid up from my chair and walked backward as he stepped forward.

His words held very little meaning; we had an audience and he punished me in a violent manner. 

He was seducing me, aiming to dig inside my head and stir up the Keaton who thought she couldn’t thrive without him. It worked at one point because I believed in the good parts of Noah. 

I was awakened and very aware. I wasn’t thriving with him; I was fading into nothing. I couldn’t leave my friends and family for a life with promises of my self-destruction with a truly demented man. I once believed in a method to his madness—penalize the guilty and make the innocent grateful for what they took for granted. 

While at first I was unsure how I’d fit with my family and friends, I always missed them. The pieces of who Noah and I were failed to fit together. We were two incompatible music notes who couldn’t form a harmony no matter how hard we tried.  Everything I had was in D.C. I only wished Noah hadn’t succumbed to his darker desires and wanted to be a part of it, or found some way to conform to me, the way I tried to conform to him. 

“We’ve tried it your way and it didn’t work,” I reminded him, my back meeting the wall. 

I was tugged by my hair so hard I fell forward. He threw me over his shoulder and forced me to sit back in the chair.

“Move again, Keaton,” Noah threatened.

“I really feel sorry for you.” Nadine wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb and smirked at me. 

I looked between the two of them, questioning what constantly pulled them together and made them connect to each other. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t love him like he wanted me to, but now I’m thinking it’s a problem that I don’t.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, princess.” Noah snorted after a measured delay while standing over me. He rested his hand on the back of my chair and leveled his gaze down to me. “I don’t need your love when I can control your obedience. Why would I need your love when I have your mind and every inch of your body?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention these last couple of weeks?” I asked. “You no longer have either. I completely check out of my body every time you touch me. I don’t feel anything you want me to anymore.”

He clenched his fist as his arm lay tensely at his side, draining it of its usual tan coloring. The blue in his eyes seemingly began to darken. “You know what irritates me the most about you, Keaton? You’re fighting against who I made you become so you can live a life that isn’t yours.”

“I know some things aren’t perfect in my life,” I admitted, “but they aren’t supposed to be. Once I figure out what I really want, it will get better. It has to. What I’m not sure of anymore is why I’m with you. Whatever it was between us, it’s gone.” I turned my attention to Nadine. “I didn’t understand why you were loyal to him. Suddenly, I do. You love him.

“I think you know Noah isn’t capable of loving you. I don’t think he can even love himself.” I looked down at my lap feeling the heat of Noah’s slow simmering anger from above me. “I don’t know what I wanted. I know I won’t chase after something he will never give me. I know you don’t love Adam. I didn’t see it at Rebirth, and I don’t see it here now. No matter how hard Noah punishes me, or how badly he treats me, he will never look at you the same way he looks at me.”

She began to frown severely, lines formed in the corner of her mouth. “Hmph,” she huffed while staring me down. “You’re such an idiot, Keaton. Get your act together, because our reach is long and wide. If you want to keep riding on our train, get a ticket, and fall the fuck in line.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I want to live my life, or figure out how to live in it. I don’t want to hide or run away anymore.” I cast a glance at Noah, “I only hope that someday you will get the help you really need.”

My words obviously upset him. “Nadine, your advice was fucked. I’m tired of talking. It seems Keaton only understands one language.” He reached down and picked me up, positioning me to sit on the edge of the table. “Hold her down,” he barked at the two guests. 

I rolled and tried to run but was preempted by Adam. He grabbed me from behind in a bear hug and pulled me back. I was forced to sit on the table and lay back. Acting swiftly, the three of them moved in sync to bind me to the table with rope and restrict the movement of my neck and my arms. 

My legs were spread; Nadine worked to secure my legs to the table as they dangled off the edge. I kicked and wiggled, visibly upsetting her. “You’re going to have to drug her, Noah. If she kicks me one more time, I’m going to hurt her.” Noah was already at the ominous case on top of the server before she finished her statement. Opening it, he pulled out a syringe and stalked toward me.

“No. Please. Don’t drug me.” 

Adam’s hand went over my mouth, shushing my cries.

Without affection, Noah harshly implanted the tip of the needle into my thigh and pushed the plunger. A burning warmth filled me, making my limbs disobey me and fall limp.

“We won’t be having dessert tonight after all.” I watched him plod in the direction of the kitchen and remove himself from my view. When he returned, he slammed the stockpot that was once on the stove onto the wood table. 

He disappeared again and reappeared with the hand made whip. He dipped it into the boiling water and slid a pair of scissors over to Nadine. “Cut everything off of her. I’m going to remind her of something she’s clearly forgotten. Tonight…I’m going to make sure she never forgets again.”

Every hit, biting my skin with a searing burn, I tried to find what was lost to me—my positive memories that made the torment transform into a dull ache. It remained out of reach and out of sight, becoming unfamiliar in my need to cope. What I did remember was Noah’s cruelty—then and now. It flooded my senses until there was no spaces left for much else. It sent a message to me loudly, filling my ears with resolve and resolution.

Through the wells of my tears, I watched Nadine grin at me as she sat in a chair, pulled up to the edge of the table, between my gaped open legs.

“Please don’t,” I implored. “Don’t do this to me. I’m not that way. I don’t want this. I—”

“Keaton,” Noah bowed over me to glare at me, “your sexual repression, frigidness, and homophobia are showing. Disobedience makes me seethe with anger. I think you’re familiar with that fact very intimately, aren’t you? You are whatever I define, and right now, you are my whore, hungry for everything I want to give you—everything I allow to happen to you.”

I pressed my lips together and closed my eyes.

I could feel everything and move nothing. Her tongue tickled my sex and her fingers probed me.

Noah stood watch only inches behind her, holding her hair and visibly taking pleasure in watching me fracture.  

Wearing a cruel expression, Nadine wiped my arousal from her mouth and stood. She crawled up my body until she remained on all fours above me. “Not a lesbian, huh? You sure liked that didn’t you?” She glanced back at Noah. “She’s ready for you.” She laid flat against my body with her thighs cradling my waist. Her chin was propped on her hand as she stared down at me and waited. 

Having her above me and smelling the sick scent of her perfume nauseated me.

From behind Nadine, Noah unbuckled and unzipped, removing nothing of his clothing. 

“Getting you wet was pointless,” Noah rasped. “You’re going to feel this night for weeks—and I’m not speaking of the place where you want me most.”

Immobile and able to feel everything, Noah proceeded to do something that I had no words for. What was once the gateway to pleasure I’d never experienced previously became a weapon. 

I screamed and cried through Nadine’s hand, cupped over my mouth. 

“I want to hear her, Nadine,” Noah growled through strained grunts.

“Should’ve warned me to wear ear plugs,” she muttered and dropped her hand. She sat on my abdomen and stared down at me, watching me intently.

He pumped into me with hard, deeply penetrating strokes and held my legs up, pushing the back of my knees toward his chest. 

His erection was a serrated dagger, trying to pierce through the softest flesh over and over again. The harsh pounding irritated the welts from the place he burned me on my inner thighs. 

When he withdrew, Nadine unbound me and slid behind me. She pushed me to an upright position, ensuring I saw Noah’s cock as it pulsed. It was dressed in blood, tinged pink from the milky fluid of his arousal. Every involuntary tremble and shiver from my body made me feel it. He…destroyed me.

FACE DOWN IN BED, I was too scared to move my head. Breathing, adjusting my neck—anything that meant movement exacerbated the anguish. 

Noah happily whistled while the water in the shower rang out. The steam made the barely breathable air muggy and stagnant. I stared at the empty tan bottle on the nightstand and my body revolted from the pain and constantly shivered.

My back and my sex were in agony. My mind was torn to shreds from being demeaned and becoming the receptacle for every single one of Noah’s broken promises. They were no longer love notes, they were scars of hatred and depraved, distressful memories. 

He slipped out of the shower, moving about the space as he put on his clothes. He watched me with an unseemly permanent smile on his face. “The salve should numb you in about two hours, but not enough for you to move around,” he said, referring to the ointment he’d placed on my wounds once Nadine and Adam left. 

“You should think about what Nadine warned you about last night,” he continued. “Especially with your mother so adamantly going after the senate seat. The things I could reveal about you and her? What do you think I went back for after I left you at Rebirth? The recordings. I grabbed the case containing every recorded feed taken inside every corner of the compound. And last night…I think you know it was recorded, don’t you? Every inch of this place has a camera. There is no place you can hide from me. A proper woman like you would never want anything I’ve recorded to see the light of day. What would your high society friends think of you?”

I continued to stare at him while pressing my lips together to prevent giving him any reason to hurt me further, or to think he had broken me.

“I would ask where you planned to go today, but you and I both know you’re not going anywhere. I have something for you.” With a wink, he disappeared into the grand space. Upon his return, he sat on the edge of the bed and set a small box down beside me. Picking up my left hand, he slid a ring on my finger. “You will vow to be mine forever in the eyes of God.” 

Staring at the blinding diamond on my finger, I lost the grip on my rebellion. I began to cry. 

He leaned over the bed and trailed a tear down my cheek. “Tonight, I’m going to tell you about the course both our lives will take.” He grinned broadly, flashing his gleaming white smile at me. “I’m very excited about our future together, princess. You’ll be excited about it, too…eventually.”

“You sick—”

“Careful,” he warned me. “You’ve decided that it has to be this way. If you want a different outcome, adhere to a different script. Remember, you no longer exist for them; you exist for me and my love…my pain and pleasure when I want to give it—when you deserve it.” He strode out of the room, whistling the entire way.

Upon hearing the door latch close, I mentally prepared myself for the onslaught of physical revulsion. It didn’t matter how hurt or torn up my body was. I had one purpose: to find a phone. I made it downstairs to the guard station and was able to convince Lem to allow me to use his cell.