Kill Switch (Devil's Night, #3)

by Penelope Douglas

And look at that. He was right.

No, he didn’t make me do something I didn’t want to do, but he made me do something I would never have done with Damon Torrance.

He was going to get off. Nothing was going to happen to him. Guys like him never paid.

I would never trust another man again. I’d have to leave my school and my home to escape the gossip.

He’d put something in the water?

“I just wanted to hold you,” he said. “One last time.”

“Just wanted to hold you.” His voice loomed somewhere over my head as my eyes started to close. “And say I’m really fucking sor—”

“Don’t let me go,” he whispered in my ear. “Don’t let go.”

His lips rested against my cheek, and I thought I felt his body shake with a silent sob.

CHAPTER 22

But my weak heart kept thinking about what he said in bed two nights ago when I’d held the blades to his ribs and neck. About lying to me being the only way he felt he could get close to me in high school. Maybe it was just a lie he fed my mother to get rid of her.

“I do hate him,” I told her. “I just wish I hated him every second.

“She told me what Damon did. But you don’t seem to hate him. Why?”

“After everything that was happening in that house happened to him.”

“It’s a reason. Plain and simple. There’s always a reason why things are as they are.”

I clutched the sheet, resenting the thought that wormed its way in. That a part of me wished he wasn’t gone. Where was he? It had been days. Did he still have Mikhail?

“You don’t want to want it,” he said in a low, deep voice, “but you do.”

He was my sister’s husband, and he wanted to make sure I was never happy again.

And then his lips caught mine, biting, and I kissed him back, letting his tongue sink into my mouth and feeling the need for him course through my body.

But I didn’t stop. “And I hate myself around you,” I told him, saying anything to hurt him. “I hate what I let myself do with you, because the only way I can get you away from me is to get it over with!”

“So come on,” I dared him. “Fuck me. Do the only thing you know how to do, because it’s all you can take from me anyway, and I don’t give a shit about any of it! Take the house. Take the family who left me here with you. Take the fucking clothes off my back and make me walk out of here naked!” Sobs filled my throat, but I refused to let them loose. “I would gladly do it if it meant getting away from you!”

“You shouldn’t have killed her,” I said, digging deep for the worst fucking things that would ever come out of my mouth. “She was the only one who was ever going to love you. She was the only one who wanted to touch you and take care of you and be around you!”

I stood there, my fingers curled into fists. What was wrong with him?

Who was he? Who the hell was he? He was a machine. A monster. A liar. What the fuck was I supposed to do? What did he want from me?

“Even at seven years old, though,” he continued, “I knew the horror of finding my dog hanging from a tree in the woods wasn’t as awful as the realization that my father made no attempt to hide what he’d done.”

“He wanted me to find him.” His voice grew thick with tears. “Even then I understood that the dog wasn’t the one being punished, and that next time he’d make me do the deed. I never asked for another dog after that.”

“And I learned, really quick, that life wasn’t going to be pretty. Not until . . .”

“I was so alone,”

“I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have any friends. I was scared all the time.”

“I just wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because . . .” His sad voice trailed off. “Because t...

That’s what was going through his mind when I met him that first time? What eleve...

“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”

“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute. And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking survived nonetheless and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone anymore, because you had taught me how to get rid of the shit. I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing when I laid eyes on you again.”

“You made the world look different,” he told me. “You always had, and it struck me as odd, because I hated to watch my mother dance growing up. It was just some elaborate lie that I couldn’t stomach, but you . . .” He trailed off, searching for words. “It was pure, and it was a dream. I didn’t want to change you. I just wanted to be a part of it all. Of everything beautiful you were going to do.”

This was the first time he’d ever said things like this. The first time he’d ever really talked to me.

“Something amazing happened, though. You followed. You wanted to feel that edge, too, as long as you were at my side, and for a few incredible days, I felt . . .”

“When it was time to come clean, I couldn’t,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I just wanted to stay there with you. Behind the waterfall, in the shower, in the ballroom . . . Just stay with you.”

“Nothing was a lie,” he whispered.

My fear. My worry. My hatred. My anger. Why hadn’t he said all that years ago? Why?

CHAPTER 23

I looked at Will. “Do you hate me?”

I’d hurt them the most, and if they could get past this, then I had a chance.

Yeah. Which would happen sooner or later.

Taking down Winter’s father wasn’t just to get Winter.

“Because Michael couldn’t care less, and the rest of us are felons.”

“I have bigger plans for her,” I told them.

Banks deserve everything

If the past could be the past and fucking stay there, that was.

But then Will spoke up, not looking at me. “Say you’re sorry,” he said.

I gave Winter a whole fucking monologue last night, and not one word from her since. What we did mattered, not what we said.

I wanted them back, though, and while my father taught me powerful men didn’t apologize, maybe—just this once—I could choke out the words. I had fucked up, after all, and I was actually pretty lucky they hadn’t taken my head over everything.