Page 9 of Feed Your Fiends

“Dove—”

“Don’t. Call. Me. Dove. I’m not your fucking dove. I’m not your anything.” I throw the IV needle like a dart and hit my target. Not that he tried to dodge it.

He sighs softly, as if he’s the exhausted one.

“At least you’re in the right place to get treated for a stab wound,” I snark.

“Why would I bother?” he asks calmly, pulling the needle from his arm. “I’ve fucked you raw, split your cunt and licked our bloody cum from your pussy afterwards. You sucked it off my tongue, remember? Then you begged me to go get more so you could swallow it. Swallow us.”

Heat explodes up my neck, but I ignore the burning, refusing to avert my eyes and back down.

“I think we’ve shared enough already. This is the least of my worries.” He hangs the tube over the IV rack.

Rubbery footsteps, like a nurse in non-slip shoes, squeak down the hallway and past my door.

Call out. Tell her to escort his ass out.But I know,like I know, that it’s no use.

“It wasn’t right, making those shoes,” Gant says, peeling his eyes away from the crack beneath the door to meet my furious gaze. “I’m not saying that it was, regardless of the circumstances. I’m just telling you my role in it.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your whys.” I rip the hospital gown off and ball it up before tossing it onto the futon beside the bed.

He swallows, drinking in my naked form with the same amount of lust he’s always had. The samefeignedlust. Games. All of it. A stupid game for a bored, angsty rich boy and me? A rag doll I’d let him use like a cum rag.

I push my arms through the long sleeves of a feminine designer, knee-length coat that’s three sizes too small. It still smells like her perfume. But not even the reminder of her presence can dampen the mild sense of victory flowing through my veins as Gant’s lusty gaze, fake as it is, falters.

“I give a fuck,” he says quietly. “It’s important that you know that when I said I couldn’t see a future, that was before I fell in love with you.”

In love with you.More lies he thinks I’m still stupid, pathetic enough to believe.

“Because I’m so fucking special?” I snap, dangling my feet off the bed and aligning them with the disposable bedroom slippers.

My surgery just extracted the glass shards. My bones were fine and, miraculously, so were my muscles and tendons. The doctor said what saved me was falling immediately out of pointe without completing any of the dance sequences while wearing the rigged slippers. It’s what kept most of the fragments superficial, with a few minor exceptions.

Still, that didn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t suffer from residual pain, unforeseen complications or infections. Or future surgeries if I was right that they’d missed a piece that would work its way deeper toward my vital anatomy.

Once again, I’m reminded of my lack of guarantee when it comes to dancing ballet at a high enough level to make it a career, and my fury flares along with angry tears that burn my eyes.

I grip the wheelchair I’d been lent this morning. I’m not allowed to put pressure on my feet for at least a week. Four more days to go. But as I wiggle the slippers on and attempt to slip into the chair, blobs of pure white burst through my vision from the sudden movement. I sway, and Gant circles the bed to scoop me into his arms before settling me back on the mattress and against the pillows.

A metallic clink reverberates around the room as he kicks the wheelchair so it sails across the tiles before banging into the wall beneath the massive window.

Before I can recover to fight him off, he’s already taking a step back and giving me space, for now. I can’t even glare at him as I squeeze my eyes shut to stop the room from swimming, but I can hear his feet shuffling across the tile before a door creaks. Before I can convince myself that he’s just an apparition, he returns.

“You’re not just special to me, Elle,” he whispers, leaning over me again. “You’re invaluable. There’s nothing I won’t do to have you. To keep you. And I’m going to prove it.”

Through the fog, I peer at him like the alien species he must be. “Are you slow? There’s nothing on planet Earth that could convince me—”

“Everyone has a price, Elle.”

Elle, not Dove. So he’d listened.For now.

“Even you.”

Those two little words send something sailing through my veins other than pain and fury.Fear. Because even in the dark, I can see something unworldly swirling in those black tunnels.

“You just said I was invaluable.”

“To me. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, I’ll pay it.”

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