Isak had controlled her. Of course he had. It crawled a sourness into my stomach.
Had he really done that?
Though my mind had been partially AWOL, I was sure. She had been a teenager at most, but likely younger than thirteen.
The paleness of her face and smallness of the wrists on those gun-holding hands.
“Ted’s daughter,” I whispered.
“What?” Isak turned his head. The car kept growling along.
“Did you hook a child with those dirty claws of yours?” Oh, now. I was being brave. Too fucking brave. Dangerously so. But that was such a dirty thing to do. Dirtier than the dirtiest acts he had forced on me. “Did you?”
The wrinkles on his forehead deepened and stayed deep. Was that worry? Not him. Isak regarded me with robot steel in his gaze and said nothing.
“Did you… grab a very young girl with your mesmer power? And if so, why? How many other kids have you laid hands on?” My lips pinched tight. How would I ever know what was true if he denied it?
This riled me more than anything. Rage lit up my insides in a righteous, red-hot flare.
Again, I waited for an answer and found my fingers wrapped around that pen, tight enough to make them whiten.
“You don’t want to be asking me—”
I ignored the grit in his voice, the warning there.
“I do! Do you grab onto young girls, and I just never saw it?” Here was I, the angel of righteousness.
He turned his attention to the road, and I could see he was waiting for me to simply forget my line of inquiry.
My heartbeats made louder and louder lub-dubs. Wait. Wait… He has to answer. He cannot just be silent.
He was.
My anger climbed, tightened, coiled, wrenched in. It wasn’t just this, it was everything he had ever done to me and to the others.
Fuck you. Fuck you, Isak. You don’t get to do this. Though I knew it wasn’t likely to succeed even as I did it, even as my right hand dived across the space between us with that pen angled to stick his eye and hopefully drive into his brain.
Not missing this time. I grunted in the last microsecond of the swing.
The pen and my fist smacked into him. He had thrown up his hand and the pen had pierced his palm. It sank in. Half an inch deep. I let go, breathless, awed. The pen stayed there, embedded, until he plucked it out with his teeth.
Freeze.
That was a command.
Breathless was nothing. I lost the ability to breathe for a while, until he relented.
Seconds only, and maybe I would’ve overcome that fatal command. Maybe. Else he’d be using it on random assholes.
I gasped in air, chest heaving, with the rest of me fastened to the upholstery.
His command made me a statue in my seat, while he slowed, and exited and drove somewhere. I’d known. Of course I couldn’t kill him, no matter how much I wanted to. I’d still needed to try, for my own sanity and indignant morality.
Laughable how dumb us humans can be.
The car had stopped and ahead were trees.
“Get out.” The car door opened, and I was able to unbuckle the seatbelt and climb out. He stood there, assessing me, the rigid lines of his jaw the main physical clue to his rage. I could feel it though – we connected enough for the backwash to scare me.
“You do not get to accuse me of fucking kids. Ever!” He spat the last word as he slammed the door. His nostrils flared and he flicked his gaze down me as if I were goop scraped from the bottom of his shoe.
“Strip then walk there.” His fingers flicked open toward a large white gum tree with its bark peeling off it like paper. “Be glad I’m not fucking burying you.”
He’d said fuck, twice. That alone rang alarms.
I undressed, trembling, tripping on my panties as I drew them off. With my clothing laid in a lonely pile among the sprigs of grass on the mostly bare red earth, it did seem as if I was about to be shot and buried. I was aware of the traffic noises, but they were distant. I hoped we were concealed. Turning my head to check that proved impossible. He wouldn’t want us arrested though, would he?
He’s not killing me but… what have I done?
I ended up with my back to the wide trunk, with bark scraping at my skin. Drooping branches and leaves framed the sky and an angry Isak. He hauled off his T-shirt, revealing his torso and the ripple of muscles that I had zero doubt were about to be used to hurt me. That V of stomach ridges taunted me, luring the eye downward, into his pants… I shook, partly in fear, partly in desire, and felt the rise and scrunch of my nipples as he observed me.
That familiar shiver of soft heat down my front, seeping into my flesh and hastening my breaths, making my pussy swell and making me yearn for him…
If I spread my thighs, maybe it would make him change his mind?
I shut my eyes in a futile attempt to gain serenity, yet still I trembled.
Fucked up beyond all recognition – this was my normal.
“What did you do wrong, Red?” Oh my, that growly voice and those piercing eyes – they reached inside me and messed me up, bigtime.
I swallowed, listened to my heart for all of five beats. Where is my courage?
I made myself focus on his face. “I said… I suggested you were a pedo.”
“You did. And you will never do that again. Say it.”
“I won’t.” I sucked on my
