Page 147 of Feed Your Fiends

“That’s nothing to the Auclairs. If you think you’ve won, I want you to know that you haven’t and you never will. The Auclairs are the Auclairs with a scandal that will blow over in a few days. But you? Who are you?”

I thought I was a daughter.

I thought I was in love.

I thought someone could love me.

“I thought I was a dancer,” I say, finally glancing at my feet. “But who knows now.”

“Then we should find out,” Hale says, gesturing to the makeshift stage behind me. “Rie?”

Rie may be legally blind, but her hearing is impeccable because she clomps over in her thigh-highs and takes my duffel to safety at Hale’s command. Did he know it was filled with… I meet those dead eyes again. Of course, he knows.

“Hale,” the girl whines to his left, her arms crossed over her breasts like she’s freezing, but the club's almost unbearably warm. “She didn’t wait her turn.”

“She’s a special audition,” Hale says, pulling the girl onto the couch, and she squeals with delight as he makes her sit behind him so that he’s in the cradle of her thighs, and her tits cushion his head. “Elle. Show them how it’s done.”

“H-how what’s done?” I ask, dumbfounded.

“You’re a dancer.”

“A ballet dancer.”

“The most flexible kind of dancer. Get up there and do what you do best. Dance for us. Entertain us.”

“Why would I do that?”

He cocks his head and a tit in the process. “What else will you do? To be a part of the menagerie, you have to become an animal. Let your primal urges take over.”

I just stare at him, at this Hale I’ve never met.

“She looks so lost,” the girl behind him giggles in his ear.

“I’ll help her find herself again.” Hale extends his palm to me, a gold, engraved bracelet glimmering around his wrist, reminiscent of his mother’s. “Come here.”

I’m on a string as I walk over to him, and he points to the ground, gesturing for me to get onto my knees and between his feet.

Has he lost his mind? But then again, I’ve lost mine because I follow his instruction.

“Some liquid courage,” he says, grabbing a shot. “Open your mouth.”

What am I doing?!

I’m tilting my head back and letting him pour a shot down my throat.

“Swallow,” he commands.

Then another.

“Swallow.”

And another.

It’s warming me and numbing me simultaneously because the more I drink, the less I care. The more his frozen blue eyes reflect that nothingness into my soul.

“Ballet is your safe place right?” he asks petting my head and fucking hell I get the appeal of the girls draped over him. It’s different from Gant’s penetrating look, which is terrifying yet exciting. Hale is…magnetic, comforting though he shouldn’t be, as I lean into the small human contact of his palm on my head, so like Rin’s foot on mine. “It’s where you can lose yourself. Don’t you need to lose yourself right now?”

I nod slowly.

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