A Beautiful Nightmare: A Novel Read online

  And though it should have been easy, pushing him away made my throat burn. He was missing the point. He always missed the point. “You killed me.”

  He groaned in frustration. “I didn’t have a choice. If I agreed to his terms, I could at least buy us both some time.”

  “But those men took me anyway.”

  “Apparently I took too long. My father doubted me. The way he always does.” His eyes told me what he was feeling. Even now he felt his father’s dismissal. “This time his doubt worked in my favor.”

  My head spun, trying to land on so many things it gave up, and spun, and spun, and spun …

  “That he went over my head to kill the woman I love.” His eyes became amber. “Marks him as well. Are we done here? We’re done here.” He dropped onto the couch, eyes glazed over.

  I remained where I was, hugging myself from the chill that came in with the truth, in the middle of a tower that was no longer a prison, but the walls were still the same. “Now what?”

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Until our names are too far up on the list to remember, or they look up.”

  I couldn’t stand the coldness in his voice. It was hearing the truth when I was still living in a lie. “Why would they look up?”

  “There’s only two people who know we’re up here. They’re just as marked as we are. I watch their backs, and they watch ours.”

  “Brogan and Fillan?” I guessed bitterly. “The same people who tied me up?”

  “They’re sorry.” But his expression remained impassive.

  “What’d you do to them?”

  “What they did to you.” He met my eyes, daring me to make him the bad guy again. “They both got loose. They weren’t tied as tightly.”

  “Phew, that’s a relief.” I glared at him, but he didn’t react. “We’re still up here. I don’t want to be up here. I get why you took me now, but—”

  “I didn’t take you. I protected you. Up here we are safe.” Anger crackled between us suddenly.

  I let it rush through me. “You took me. You can’t write all of this off on your father.” I waved my arms around, but I meant it all. “I’m still locked in here with you.”

  “And that’s how it will stay!” He bolted to his feet. “I knew once you knew the truth you’d try to use it to leave. You’re not leaving. We’re going to stay up here until I think it’s safe.”

  “And then what?” I screamed back, forming fists. “We’ll skip out of here hand in hand and get married and have a long loving life together?” I could tell by the fire in his eyes that that was exactly what he wanted. “You’re sick.” I couldn’t believe he still thought that was possible. “We’re done. We were done the moment you agreed to kill me!” I punched at his chest, earning a grunt of pain.

  “We’re done?” He grabbed my face and crushed his lips down on mine. He kissed me roughly, biting and growling against my lips. The taste of his mouth shocked me, the way it always did. It was so hot and tempting. When his tongue met mine, I groaned, and he shoved me off. “That’s what I thought. We’re never done. We were meant for the other. You are my queen, and I am your king. We will never end. Don’t bring it up again!”

  I flinched away from him, wanting to slap the rage from his face. What was he mad about? I’d been the pawn in his sick fantasy slash escape plan. I suffered. Not him. He’d tasted my lips far too many times. “Or what?” I spat. “You’ll tie me to your bed next?”

  “So I could hear about that for the next six months too? No thank you. You can wipe your mouth off, by the way. You’re drooling.”

  I scrubbed a hand over my lips angrily. “It’s from your lips. You’re not worth wanting bad enough.”

  “You know what, Kinley?” He could hardly breathe through his rage. “You are an ungrateful woman. I devoted my life to yours, and all you can do is point out my faults and mistakes.” He started to mock me. “I was so sore. You tied me to the bed. I’m still alive instead of rotting in the trunk of a car. Why don’t you try saying thank you? Thank you, Dash, for keeping me alive. Thank you, Dash, for uprooting your entire life to keep mine. Thank you, Dash, for letting me think you were a monster, instead of letting me be as afraid as I am. Why don’t you stop lying to yourself for five fucking minutes, and admit the reason you’re here is because you love me the same way I love you. You love me, or you never would have looked at me like you did when you found out. Like I killed you. You never looked that way when you found out about Denny. You are not the victim here. Get over it, because it’s getting old.”

  Fire reached up inside of me and gripped my heart. I had never felt more rage for a person than I did in that moment. I wanted to do what I always did. Rip his soul up until it was writhing on the ground begging for me. And then I’d stomp it like I did every man before him, the way they all stomped on mine. But deep, deep down, I knew I was madder at myself. Madder that I knew in my bones there was no way out of this.

  His eyes shot to my fists. “If you hit me, we’re going to be roommates. As painful as it will be, that’s the way it will become. No touching, no talking. I’ll keep you in the dark and let you blame me for everything. I don’t like being hit. And you shouldn’t want to. You shouldn’t want to hit the man you love.”

  “I don’t love you! This is not love. And don’t threaten me. I’m not a child you can punish. I am a grown woman. I can do what I want.”

  He began to pace like a caged animal. Then he shot up and pointed, the threat in his eyes burning. “The next time you lie, I’m going to start lying too. I’m a better liar than you. Remember that? I ran an empire, and I lied every single day. Try me,” he growled, when I rolled my eyes. “This is not a game, Kinley. Let how you got here go and open your eyes. This is our life I’m talking about.”

  Red tinted my vision. I looked him right in the eye, and lied to his damn face. “I do not love you.”

  Fire raged between us.

  He straightened and nodded. “I do not love you either.”

  And I felt it. A spark of devastation. It was small, easily ignored, but it was there, and he knew it. “I know what you’re doing. I’m not your patient. Negative reinforcement doesn’t work if I understand what you’re doing.”

  “Well, you know everything. Don’t you, my queen?”

  16.

  I Always Marked What I Wanted

  He took off for his side of the kingdom and disappeared inside.

  My anger had nowhere to go but in. I swallowed it down and ignored the way it wanted to come right back up. I hated it when men left me alone with their hurt. But Dash wasn’t like all of them. For one, they hadn’t given me walls and demand I love them. And they’d all been as mad as me, and that meant everything was reciprocated. Even the blows.

  Around my anger, guilt began to form. I swallowed that too, but it wasn’t as easily ignored.

  The living area looked different to me now. Less like the common area in a prison, and more like a living room in a safe house. I despised that too. This wasn’t a sane response to danger. Dash couldn’t make this the only choice and turn his back on all the others. There had to be other options that didn’t take so much of our lives. If this were about us, then both of us had to have a say.

  He couldn’t make up my mind, and then roar when I disagreed.

  I stomped into my room and slammed down on my sensor. Elevators. I should have known. I spent the rest of my day and night beneath my covers. It was my own space inside of his. I understood why I had my own room now. He predicted my reaction eerily well, and there would have been no way I would have gotten to the truth with him in my space. My thoughts ran rampant as the sun set behind my covers. When my room was dark, I burrowed deeper into my own darkness, trying to piece together the picture Dash had painted.

  He’d explained it to me countless times in the beginning. The reasons he couldn’t open up were more for me, than for him. But I’d pushed him, because I could sense that whatever prevent
ed him from speaking, was the same thing that prevented him from being himself. I was right. The son of a ruthless cold gang leader, Dash had been forced to grow up in a world that made illness, not tolerated it. His horror-filled stories made my skin crawl. But they were just that. Stories. They were words spoken in secret. They weren’t threats aimed at me.

  But I knew things.

  Bad things.

  Because Dash had told them to me.

  I’d struggled with them at the time, dark tales woven into his childhood, until they faded into the recesses of my mind. I imagined a little girl skipping around the things Dash told me and humming If I Only Had a Heart, until their evil was no more. The only way his father knew anything was because of Denny. Raynard McKing knew what I knew, and he wanted me gone.

  He wanted me gone.

  Denny wanted me gone.

  And Dash wanted to keep me.

  For one small second I contemplated that perhaps I had been wrong. I was so quick to judge him and his illness. This had insane written all over it, but Dash would struggle forever to understand what sane was, and never come close. If this was the only way he thought he could keep me from becoming one more evil his father committed, then he wouldn’t exactly change his mind. He would do what he thought was right. In this case that meant locking the woman he supposedly loved in a tower. He had to understand that there were far too many faults in his armor, and that I was the biggest one.

  Emerging from my darkness, I pulled my covers aside and walked over to my sensor. I stepped into the darkened living room and padded barefoot over to his door. After a few minutes, there was no sign that he was coming. It was so quiet I couldn’t hear a thing. The night outside was particularly black. I walked to the edge and looked over, finding the city below was still awake. It was quiet in the clouds. My eyes fell on the building below us. It was at the end of the long street, but still somehow too close. The lights were on in that one as well.

  There had to be a better way. Hiding to save our lives ended them anyway.

  Hugging myself, I crossed the room back to his door and touched the sensor. Instead of turning red, it glowed in the dark, and the door slid open with a quiet swoosh. I stared at the door in suspicion. Why did knowing the truth make me any less threatening? But with that thought came a loss. The exit wouldn’t be where I was allowed.

  I stepped despondently inside, finding myself in a black hallway. There was another sensor immediately on my right, and darkness down the hall. Somehow, I thought of the men who stepped out of the bushes, and shuddered, immediately engaging the sensor with a desperateness. That door too slid open, spitting me out into a room that was all black.

  “Dash?” I whispered.

  There was a familiar sound around me. Snoring. I tried to blink my eyes a few times, but the black was too much. I started to panic. The scent of him was thick in this room. Warm, comforting, and spicy. But I felt oddly alone, the way I did when I’d went on my last run.

  “Dash?”

  He murmured something illegible before his snoring continued.

  Why was it so dark in here? I took a step forward with my arms outstretched. Nothing but air. I took another tentative step full of air. His snoring was the only indicator I was going the right way. Finally, my shins hit something soft but firm. My palms touched the softness of his blanket. I put my knees on his bed and began crawling to him, feeling his body along the way. When I got to his head, my eyes had begun to adjust enough to locate his dark hair. His face was aimed the other way.

  I touched his pale shoulder and whispered his name once more. All I got was snoring. With a frustrated sigh, I decided to wait it out. But his room was so dark, and his covers soft. There was an A/C vent close by, and the icy air blew onto my legs, making me too cold to want to risk leaving. I slid beneath his covers and rolled onto my side, nestling up against his body heat. My eyes began to drift. If my room were this blacked out, I’d surely sleep better. It made me wonder why he’d given me nothing but light, and kept himself in the dark, but my eyes closed and my brain silenced enough for me to sleep.

  It was the first night since I’d awoke here where I slept without remembering. I thought it had something to do with the fact that the walls were also around Dash as thickly as they were around me.

  I rolled over and groaned, opening my eyes to find his on me. The room was still just as dark, but the whites of his eyes were glowing in the blackness.

  We didn’t speak.

  I lay on my side and gazed up at him tiredly as he did the same to me. His head was propped on his hand, and his other rested between us. Muscles deep in my groin tightened at the look on his face. His disheveled dark hair and stubble-covered jaw looked wild and unkempt. He looked gorgeous, like the Dash I spent weeks waiting on to make an appointment.

  “I apologize,” he said, his full lips parting enough to rumble his apology. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. Please forgive me, my queen.”

  I squeezed my thighs together and nodded in the dark.

  His hand between us twitched, but neither of us mentioned it. I thought he was waiting for me to make the first move. Once I did, my fight would end. I’d been let into his side of the kingdom, and I’d fallen asleep next to him in his bed. Anymore fighting would be more lies. And though I wasn’t ready to face the truth head on, I did place my hand in his.

  A heavy sigh fell from his lips. He tangled our fingers together and clasped his around me, holding me in place. All Dash waited for was a sign that I wouldn’t pull away, and then he’d curl himself around me and my heart, and dunk me in his darkness again and again until I was drenched in it.

  “I love you,” he breathed. “May I show you how much?”

  My breathing went shallow. For the first time, I told the truth to myself. I didn’t care what Dash had done. I didn’t care. All I wanted was to have him inside of me right now. In answer, I leaned close to him and pressed my lips to his. All of these lies were making it hard to breathe. And he smelled too damn good to not inhale the air around me.

  With a satisfied groan, he kissed me in return. Our tangled fingers crushed between our chests as he came for me; neither of us let go. With his free hand, he held my face in place as his body weight settled over me. I opened my legs, granting him more space. He tasted warm and hot. I devoured his mouth with a hunger I felt mostly where my inner muscles trembled in anticipation. I pried my fingers free from between us, and settled both on his bare back. As he took my mouth, I traced the muscles there. His skin was hot and smooth, and his heat seeped in to my palms. The hair on his legs tickled my inner thighs. He was everywhere, and I loved it. Heat and weight, cologne and lips, groans and lust—I was loved.

  “Condoms,” he whispered.

  I shook my head, not wanting to ruin my time in the clouds. I slid my hands lower, finding he was only in his briefs. I pushed them off his ass and dug my fingers into his taut flesh. When I felt the argument in him, I kissed him back harder and lifted my hips to meet the thick hard mound of his cock wedged between us, silencing him. With another groan, he settled deeply between my legs, and stroked his tongue with mine, forgetting what had distracted him.

  He tasted like perfection. Like heat and breath. I gripped handfuls of his body, his back, his ass, fisting my fingers in his sweat dampened hair. I loved the feeling of his weight, as though he were pressing me down, pushing every lie in my body out through our lips. So I kissed him harder, saying thank you the only way I knew how.

  His hand snaked up my side and pushed my camisole away, breaking our kiss long enough to tear it over my head. His chest pressed into my breasts. My nipples hardened at the feel of his chest hair brushing against them. We were cloaked in darkness, and it had never felt so good to be held, kissed … desired.

  Tears tried to break free, but it was like Dash knew I was breaking inside. He let my lips go and kissed down my jaw and throat, sucking my skin between his teeth. His lips heated my flesh between my breasts before he kissed t
o the side, nipping and sucking at my skin. When his lips closed around my nipple, I arched and moaned, squeezing my eyes shut as desire rushed through me. My tears disappeared. I returned to him, to what I really wanted.

  His teeth rolled around my nipple, placing just enough pressure on my hard bud to send a flood of heat to my core. In the black room I tried to see him, but it was useless. I focused on his feel instead. His lips kissing down my stomach, pausing to dip his tongue in my naval, and continuing when I jerked. His hands peeled my shorts off, leaving me bare and wanting. His lips kissed down my inner thigh before they fumbled between my folds. I could hear how wet I was, feel how wet I was. I was pulsing from having him so close. And when his tongue flicked at my clitoris, I sat up and bowed, shattering from the slam of pleasure pulsing from his mouth.

  “Truth?” He didn’t wait for my reply, and instead, pried my legs apart wider so he could slip his tongue into my opening. He lapped at me delicately, teasing me.

  My breaths were louder than my pulse. “Mmm,” I moaned, saying yes, saying don’t stop, saying everything I hadn’t.

  “We love each other.” He urged his tongue inside of me deeper, making me shake from my orgasm. “I love you.” His tongue urged deeper. “And you love me.” His fingers came into play. He gently pushed one inside of my wet heat. “You’re afraid. So am I. You don’t have to be brave all of the time, Kinley. I will protect you.” He picked up speed, filling me just enough to make me want more. “You know now I didn’t bring you here to hurt you. I brought you here to keep you.” He brought one more finger to my heat, and slowly eased inside, warming me up before he took me away.