Broken Doll (Willow Heights Prep Academy: The Exile #4)

by Selena .

The way they think they’re saving you, but they’re destroying you. The way they keep you from saving her after you destroyed her.

I don’t know why I care. I watched two guys fuck her. I gave them permission. I made sure to watch, so I knew I could never want her again, never think she was mine. I broke her on purpose, but piece by piece, I’m the one falling to pieces.

He sits there a few seconds, and then he climbs out of the truck and closes the door quietly behind him. I fold over on myself, wrapping my arms around my knees and sobbing so hard I can feel something inside me tearing open like a black hole swallowing everything left of me. And then my door opens, and Royal climbs up in the seat, pulling me into his lap. “No,” he says, pressing his face into my hair. “I’m not leaving, Harper. Not again. Not ever.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t care about her, or you, or if you’re lying through your teeth. I could matter to you, or the whole town, or no one, and it wouldn’t make a difference. I don’t matter to me.”

“Then let me breathe for you until you remember how. Because I’m not going anywhere, Harper.”

I can’t swallow. I can’t breathe. I am frozen, caught in the teeth of the nightmare that gripped me all summer.

“He’s been sucked into your orbit,” he says. “You were a passing sun whose gravitational pull was strong enough to pull him out of his solar system and into yours. Now you’re stuck with him. He can’t leave you alone. But I think you know that, Jailbird. I think you knew all along that men like Royal don’t love twice.”

“You’ll keep orbiting each other, your own little solar system with only two planets, until you stop fighting it,” Baron says. “The longer you resist it, the more damage you’ll do. Both of you.”

“I’m not just going to kiss you, baby,” he says. “I’m going to fuck you, and you’re going to like it.”

“Stay with me, baby,” he says. “I’m right here. Look in my eyes. Don’t go away.”

“Thank you,” he whispers, his breath warm on my wet skin. In that one breath, one heartbeat, the space between heartbeats where life is measured and decided, I’m weightless. I’m lost and I’m found, I’m destroyed and renewed, I’m insignificant and infinite. I am his, and I am free.