My mother is still young, only sixteen when she had me, so her skin is still tight from youth and years of dancing, her black hair is long and soft, she smells good…

I’ve had sex with others. Girls around town. Women my father keeps. I can do this.

And if I want it to stop, who will I tell anyway? My father won’t care. No one will, and telling will make him angry and make people laugh at me. I’d be weak and an embarrassment to him.

I can’t tell.

This isn’t a big deal. My mother isn’t unusual. Men look at Banks the same way my mother looks at me. That’s why I hide my sister. So they won’t go after her.

I see so much shit, and I don’t know if it’s wrong, but it never ends, and I’ve gotten used to everything that happens in the late hours. Maybe it happens everywhere and nobody talks about it.

But she rubs her hand over my dick through my jeans, and I just can’t.

“No, stop,” I growl, stumbling back. “I don’t want to.”

I don’t fucking want to. I won’t tell, but I’m not doing shit I don’t want to do anymore.

But she protests, “Damon.”

She advances on me but stops, and looks down at the floor. Picking up her foot, she inspects the smears staining the wood. “Is that… blood?” she asks me and reaches down, lifting the ankle of my jeans and seeing the blood soaked into the hem. “Oh, my God, what have you done?”

Not enough, apparently. I’d completely forgotten about the cuts once she walked in, because the broken skin wasn’t enough pain to mask the shit she brought with her.

Taking my hand, she drags me into the bathroom adjoining my bedroom and pushes me back against the countertop, lifting up my foot.

“Are these cuts?” she exclaims.

Like you’re shocked. She knows what I’ve been doing for years now. The cuts I hide under my feet. The scars under my arms and hair. The slices, pricks, and burns that are covered under my boxers until they heal and then I do it all over again. I’d gotten creative in hiding the shit I did to release pain.

She wets a washcloth and pushes me back more, so I sit on the counter, and lifts my foot.

But I jerk away. “I can do it!”

She slaps me, and my head jerks to the side, the sting of her hand burning across my face like fire and ice. I close my eyes, grateful for it. A cool sweat breaks out all over me.

“There, there, now,” she soothes like I’m five. “You don’t need to talk. Remember what we said? You don’t need to talk. I always know what you need.”

She wipes up the blood, applies Band-Aids to the five slices I made, and checks the other foot, sighing in relief that it wasn’t injured.

“You need to be careful,” she tells me. “The basketball team needs you. You can’t hurt your feet like that.”

That was why I did it. It didn’t hurt my game at all. If anything, I played harder and faster, so the pain of running on that court would exhaust me, so I couldn’t think or fight when I came home.

“Better?” she asks.

She doesn’t wait for my answer, though. Coming in, she wraps her arms around me again, kissing my cheek and trailing more over my jaw and mouth.

“Such a good boy,” she whispers. “So much energy. So physical.” Her hands move over my body as her kisses get wetter and longer. “So much endurance and muscle. So much power.” And then her hand reaches between my legs, massaging my cock. “Such a good, growing boy.”

I grip the back of her hair, and she moans as my fingers dig into her scalp and I stare at my reflection in the glass shower door.

Bitch.

Slut.

Pussy.

Nothing but a fuck.

“Rachel Kensington’s mother called me,” she says, licking, kissing, and panting against my neck. “She said she found you and her daughter half naked on their couch last night.”

I take her waist in my other hand, kneading the flesh through the silk, never blinking as I stare at myself and letting all the emotions rip through me.

Anger.

Shame.

Fear.

Violence.

Pain.

Sadness.

Helplessness.

They float through, jumbling together until I can’t identify one from the other, and it’s not even me in the reflection anymore. Everything in my brain leaves, my mind turns off, and my hands stop shaking. I’m just a body.

This is me.

I am me.

“She was glad nothing serious had happened,” my mother goes on.

Rachel who?

“Oh, sweetie,” she coos. “I understand. Boys will be boys, and she teased you, didn’t she? She wouldn’t let you have it.”

I dig my fingers into her skull, squeezing her hip tighter.

“Shhh,” she says, trying to pull away from my hold. “Little girls just don’t understand what boys need. It’s okay. I’m here.” Her lips trailed a line across my jaw, mewling as she tries to get my grip off her hair.

“You can pretend I’m her,” she tells me, my dick growing hard and hot with blood. “Show me what you were going to do to her. Show me how you wanted to fuck that silly little girl.”

No, no, no…

“Show me,” she urges. “Fuck me.”

No…

“Take what’s yours,” she growls. “Give that girl what she deserves.”

I suck in a breath, tears springing to my eyes, and I jump off the counter, swing around, grab her by the back of the neck, and bend her over the counter.

She spreads her legs and pulls up her nightie for me, bites her bottom lip. “That’s my boy.”

I hold her head right in front of the mirror, staring at her as she challenges me back.

“Do it, baby,” she whispers. “Come all inside me. Come on, come on, come on…”

And I glare at her, tighten my hold on her hair and neck, press her into the counter, and pull her head up—

She gasps, ready to get it.

And I shove her head into the mirror as hard as I can, splintering the glass, and she screams.

“Damon!” she cries out, but I can’t stop.

A wave of euphoria washes over me, and I don’t know why my cheeks are wet, but my muscles are charged, and I just want her to fucking die.

I growl, bringing her head down again and again, blood covering the mirror, and then I haul her up, her body limp and blood pouring down her face, and I hit her, sending her flying to the floor.

She coughs and sputters, and tears stream down my face, but in that moment, I knew.

It would never happen again.

This never had to happen again. I’d kill her if I had to.

Seeing something out of the corner of my eye, I look over my shoulder, seeing Banks standing there with my headphones in her hand.

She looks from my mother on the floor—bloody and weak—to me, her eyes scared.

I rush over, grab her hand, and run from the room. She doesn’t ask questions as I pull her down the stairs, through the house, and out the back doors, into the backyard.

The moon casts a glow over the hedge maze, and we dive in, knowing our way well and finding the fountain immediately.

We climb in and settle behind the water, just like I had done a thousand times before, only once with a girl other than my sister. Banks doesn’t ask me what happened or what I’m going to do. She knows not to talk in here.

Reaching under the groove of the bowl above us, I dig out the silver barrette with pink crystals I hide there, and wrap my fist around it, remembering Winter Ashby’s words from so long ago in that fountain.

Your body can only feel one pain at a time.

She was right. I’ve found that to be true.

But instead of hurting myself to mask pain with more pain, tonight I learned something else.

Hurting others is just as effective.

My mother left after that beating. An hour later, Banks and I had gone back to my room to find her gone, and we fell asleep on the bed, leaving the door unlocked, because we knew. We couldn’t stop the world from happening to us. We could only react.

By morning, my mother was gone, and I never asked where. And as time passed, my father made no effort bring her home again. I didn’t see her until a couple of years later.

And I dealt with it for good that night.

Just like I was going to deal with Winter and the false hope she nearly destroyed me with.

“I want her to want it,” I told Mikhail, his brown eyes looking up at me expectantly. “I want her to want me, to give me her heart, and be my soft, sweet, smiling Little Devil, clutching at me and unable to stop herself.” My heart quickened. “And then I want her to hate herself for it. To turn against herself and hate that she likes it, so she knows she’s weak and pathetic and no different than any other bitch. That she wasn’t special.”

Once I see her as just like everyone else, I’ll have destroyed her and killed my obsession with her. I would’ve killed her power over me, just like Natalya’s.

“And I think she wants to play this game with me,” I joked with the animal.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Come,” I called.

The door opened and closed, and then I heard Crane’s voice behind me.

“She’s inquiring about the dog, sir.”

“Tell her the truth,” I said, smoothing the animal’s fur. “She doesn’t have one anymore.”

“She says there were sounds in the house this morning, too,” he pointed out. “Man-made sounds after you left. She got scared, ran, and went to St. Killian’s.”

“How’d she do that?”

“Uber,” he answered.

I scoffed. Jesus. I never thought of that. Woman was certainly self-sufficient.

But I remembered the first part he said. Noises?

“You think she’s overreacting?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. She seemed very sure,” he explained. “I can install cameras and an alarm system.”

“No,” I told him. “Take on more men. Two details of four each.”