Primal Pursuit - Page 152

“Why? For a spank bank? To judge me?”

Anyone else, and I’d get very handsy at those accusations. But Rabbit needs a different kind of handling here. She’s spiked, full of buried mines, and there are guards all around her at the ready with flamethrowers and bayonets. And the kicker that gets me in the fucking balls is some of those are turned inward, at herself.

“No, Rabbit,” I say in my flat, cold, blank voice. “It’s so I know the extent of pain I’m going to inflict on them both before I kill them.”

A small sob escapes, but she cuts it off. Swallows it.

She shakes her head. “I…I can’t.”

“Talk, Rabbit. Now.”

It takes me a while. Threats, cajoling, poking and prodding, but the story comes out. How the fucking disgusting prick used a traumatized girl. One I fucking traumatized. But he used her and his so-called grief to touch her in ways that’s earned him a long, agonizing death.

At first it was coming up to her room after her bath or before bed. To sit a little close.

Then the hand on the knee. An arm around her. Sliding his hand on her thigh. Kiss her and whisper how she made him feel so much better and how fucking grateful he is for her.

When she tells me all this, I step back, away from all weaponry. I don’t trust the rage that’s bubbling under the service. The blackness.

But of course, I need to reach into her and pull out more. Some of it I guessed. The hand down the top. Then under the top and the bra and the groping.

He was so pleased she made him feel better, so upset when she rejected him or even flinched.

The fucker bought her pretty little baby doll nightdresses he got her to wear. So much easier to play with.

It’s when she tells me she let him do those things to her, that’s when everything inside me turns black.

Like she had a choice. Like he didn’t groom her. Blackmail her with his vile, emotional manipulations. And she thinks shelet him?

I’m going to break all the bones in his body.

I’m going to shove a nail up his pee-hole, and funnel acid into his ass. Have the fucker burn from the inside.

Rabbit tells me in detail what he did to her. The midnight visits, the big, puffy underwear he’d buy her. Easy access.

She doesn’t cry, but her pain rips into me, anyway. She sits, naked, telling me how she let him do things to her so he wouldn’t rape her. She tried to appease him in other ways. Feed the monster a small rodent every day, it may delay its desire to hunt and devour larger prey. But eventually the rodent will no longer satisfy its hunger, and the monster will inevitably seek out a bigger and more satisfying kill.

This fucking rapist mindfucked her.

He made her think it was her fault.

She still thinks it’s her fault. She’s ashamed. And I’m seething.

I turn away and take a breath.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

God help me.

I spin to face her and eat up the floor as I go to her, pulling her to her feet. “Don’t you ever,everapologize for that, Poppy. Do you understand me?”

“But—”

“But what?”

And I can’t breathe or speak. It’s all over her pretty face. She thinks I blame her. That she’s some kind of slut for letting him do that.

“Rabbit, you were a child. You were forced, manipulated.”