Hunt Me! I Crave the Chase (Spooky Boys #3)

“Lydia’s not gonna like it if you show up at home like this,” Blair said gently. But it felt like a slap to the face, hearing her name out loud. In a place like this, where things were supposed to be bright and I was, for once in my fucking life, something other than her secret protege.

Blair didn’t know.

It wasn’t his fault.

I knew that.

He didn’t know what she made me do. The creatures I’d killed. The blood on my hands. The places she’d hole us up in—just the two of us. He didn’t know about the days spent training, the blisters on my hands, the scars, the gun I shouldn’t know how to use. Didn’t know about the way I’d lie in my bed, pretending to sleep, because there was no way I could actually rest with her lying three feet from me.

No way I could rest when I knew the pain that waited for me the second the sun rose.

The guilt.

The terror.

The blood.

The monsters.

The way I couldn’t breathe most of the time, but I breathed anyway. Always trying to be strong because if I failed even once, it was Blair who took the brunt of Lydia’s fury. He was her bargaining chip, and maybe he knew it—maybe he didn’t. But that didn’t make it any less true.

The sun would rise and the torture would start all over.

“Again,” she’d say, watching me—her eyes green as the money she coveted, when they might as well have been red. She never got dirty. Never touched a corpse, or held a gun herself. Making me repeat the drills she’d arranged over and over and over till they became so second-nature, I barely had to think about them at all.

“Again,” she’d say as she forced me to shoot targets in proxy of living creatures.

“Again,” she’d say, holding me steady, her nails biting into my shoulder, her breath hot on my back.

Then later, just as I’d suspected, on the day my gun wavered, the beast it was pointed toward staring at me, terrified, its heart thumping, its eyes wide with fear. There would be no sympathy from Lydia.

“I can’t, I can’t–”

“You’re a coward, Jeffrey. Take the fucking shot.”

Bodies, bodies, bodies. Hairy, scaly, wet with blood.

Over and over and over?—

Dead dead dead.

Because of me.

Because I didn’t say no.

Because I was?—

You’re a coward, Jeffrey.

You’re a coward, you’re a coward, you’re a coward.

You’reacowardyou’reacowardyou’rea—you’rea—you’re?—

Nononononono.

I didn’t want to be there anymore. Trapped inside my head. The alcohol was supposed to help. It was supposed to help—I was supposed to be able to breathe here, at this party, with my friends. I wanted to celebrate—I just wanted… I just wanted?—

God.