More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Don’t call him “sir” until he earns it.
The world ended for me, then started again in technicolor, on a Tuesday afternoon in fourth grade.
The real me could never be hurt, broken...destroyed. Especially not when I was with my daddy, and my daddy was the devil himself.
"The only way anyone will ever see you as a victim again is if you want them to. And at any time, you can pull the blindfold from their eyes and show them you're always the one with the knife."
It wasn’t like me to be so emotional. “You’re going to get yourself hurt being stupid,” I mouthed at myself, watching my bright pink lips move, before I slipped my sunglasses back on to hide the swelling. I didn’t know then how right I was.
My whole life had been a cover story; why was this so tiring now? Maybe I just wanted to be myself.
Then I thought about what kind of results would come up if I googled Delilah Kane, and I knew, no, that wasn’t what I wanted. I just wished I could genuinely be someone else.
But they bled a sense of power and certainty that I knew. These guys were predators.
Maybe we were still in high school. Maybe high school never really ends. What a depressing thought.
“Pax and Remington kill it on the soccer field together,” she said. “And Stellan is the captain of the hockey team.”
“Everyone loves them,” Jenna added. “Probably not as much as they love themselves.”
I hadn’t met many men like them in my life, but all the ones I had known? They were trouble.
I gazed around the room, not looking for anything in particular, just making sure everything was as it should be. We were surrounded by simpering sheep, and sometimes it's all I could do to keep my absolute disdain for these idiots off my face. If I asked any of these lemmings to lick my butthole, they'd probably do it. Absolute idiots.
There weren't a lot of people with violet fucking eyes. Elizabeth Taylor. And Delilah Kane. There was something strange about that girl. Something almost...familiar.
How the fuck had I ended up at school with Stellan Bishop in the first place?
Anyone who understood the importance of coffee first thing in the morning needed to be protected at all costs.
This girl was aggressively friendly. That was probably just what my introverted ass needed, but it was still a little overwhelming.
But you know what they say. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
Walking into the library was the closest I’d ever come to a religious experience.
The Demon and I had moved half a dozen times in the years between when he rescued me and when he destroyed me. He’d denied me a lot of things over the years with the goal of molding me into someone just as cold and cruel and dangerous as he was. Food. Medical care. Comfort. Friends, most of all. But he’d never denied me a library.
Libraries had been my salvation.
If there was one thing I’d learned from The Demon, it was how unreliable humans are. Some days they’ll help, some days they’ll ignore you.
There was a time when Stellan’s teasing and compliments left me weak. Now, even though I smiled back at him, they left me terrified.
I sighed and walked towards my closet like the grim reaper himself was hiding in there. First college party, here I come.
Loud music was blaring from the house in front of us, and I shifted nervously in my chucks. Jenna had almost thrown a fit when I'd pulled them on with my little black party dress, but I couldn't run away from a murderer in high heels. I'd learned that lesson from The Demon too.
Liar. The word pulsed in my brain as it did anytime I lied...which was frequently.
I didn't have the luxury of escape. I would have done that already.
When you held as many secrets as I did, you didn't get to forget. There was too much to lose.
I had seen people get spliced in every which way, but watching a guy get a blow job in public... well, I was blushing like mad.
I knew what it looked like when someone was unhinged. I'd seen that look for years...sometimes I'd seen it in my own gaze. And Paxton Jones was the epitome of unhinged.
You couldn't show weakness to crazy people. That was Surviving a Serial Killer 101.
I didn't know that was a thing, thanking someone for fucking your face. But what did I know?
Holy Fuck. Talk about Big Dick Energy. Cain's nickname was officially going to be #BDE because I was pretty sure those sweats were housing a trouser snake or something.
His perusal of me was...erotic. That was the only way to describe it. I might as well have been naked with the way his eyes were caressing my skin. I felt flushed, achy...needy.
Why was being a normal girl so fucking hard? Maybe I should challenge him to a knife fight or something. I could be normal then.
I'd officially lost my mind. But it felt...incredible.
It wasn't easy for me to let go, but something about Cain made me want to just give in, let him take the lead.
He had me trapped against him, and I expected to feel a flicker of panic at any moment, the need to kick him in the dick or something and make my escape. It was weird, though. I didn’t feel nervous at all restrained against him. I almost felt...comforted, with his hard body behind me.
Someone yelled nearby, and I was yanked back to the present and to the fact that I almost allowed one of the most popular guys in school to finger me in a room full of people.
The annoying voice in the back of my head told me that I was going to regret this later, but my pussy stabbed the bitch with a butcher's knife and all thoughts beyond what Cain's cock was going to taste like disappeared.
Cain ate me like it was his favorite thing. Like he couldn’t get enough. Like he craved it.
Sounds were coming out of me that I'd never heard before. I'd been possessed, consumed...destroyed.
Because I regretted it like I regretted nothing else in my life. She was the only woman I ever loved, and she was the devil I regretted.
I should have known there was no way I could get an actual second chance. What The Demon had done to me, and what he'd made me do, would haunt me all my life. But I didn't know at the time just how much it would haunt me that day.
The dirt on me from being The Demon's daughter wasn't anything that I could ever wash off.
Underneath the sudden pounding sense of loss, I felt a constant thrum of rage.
But given that I’d been bottle-fed trauma from infancy, maybe I didn’t have the best instincts.
My childhood had been a nightmare that seemed relentless where I'd careened from one terror to another, but there had been brief pleasant moments, and some of them had been provided by Pizza Hut's “Book It!” program.
Pax was growing on me already. It was too bad I couldn't trust him not to murder me any more than I could trust the others.
Dinner was torture. Which was saying a lot because I'd actually experienced torture many times in my life.
