Page 8 of Feed Your Fiends

“You,” I sputter. “You weren’t a dream? You were here? The whole time.”

“You thought you were dreaming about me?” he asks, a sudden lightness to his tone, a glint in his eye. “You dreamt that I was in this bed? Holding you?”

My mouth drifts open in horror, and I try to recoil, but the handlebars of the hospital bed stop me. “What the fuck sort of hospital is this?” I whisper to myself in utter disbelief because he isn’t the only one who’d visited me in those dreams.

Zedd, a member of Gant’s horsemen, had slipped into my room dressed in dark purple scrubs and a hairnet. He’d brought me a lunch and dinner tray that I hadn’t eaten. When I woke up, they were gone, and I assumed they had never been there to begin with.

Bae, another horseman with his long hair neatly French braided and dressed in black scrubs, had come to empty my trays and take out the rubbish at my bedside. He’d been accompanied by his wolf-dog, Zoi, who’d licked my palm and sniffed my bandaged feet.

No…that wasn’t real. They weren’t—

“My grandfather’s, of course,” Gant’s voice cuts through my thoughts to answer my question.

Of course.The Auclairs operate everything in town. Maybe that’s what gave him the delusional impression he could run my life, too.

Hadn’t he?

My new rush of energy is like a super drug because I bolt upright and pull at the blankets, suddenly desperate to be free of them and anything else Gant Auclair, including this hospital.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his normally cool voice rising as I tug at the sticky tape holding the IV in place.

His pale hands snatch my wrists in an attempt to stop me, but I’m faster. I rip the needle out with a wince, grip it like a dagger, and point it at him.

“Get the fuck away from me or this goes into your eye.”

Elle

To my surprise, he lifts his hands innocently and steps back, although there isn’t an ounce of fear in his expression. Or rather, there doesn’t seem to be a lick of fear for his safety.

He eyes the tube and the IV pouch as if worried about the amount still left inside that’s no longer pushing through my veins.

“Fine. I’ll give you space,” he says slowly, his gaze flickering to me again. “For now. But not until you listen to me first. I need you to hear this.”

“I don’t need to hear your fucked up rationalisations,” I hiss.

“I’m not here to make excuses, and I won’t ask you to forgive me. Not until I have the answers myself because I have no idea how those tampered pointe shoes got into the wardrobe department. But I’m going to find out.”

I gasp incredulously, clutching the needle tighter. “You think I’m so stupid that I’d seriously believe those shoes weren’t your doing?”

“They were my doing. My making,” he says so coldly, so matter-of-factly. So honestly. “But I didn’t bring them into the theatre. I got rid of them beforehand.”

I blink. “But you made them.”

“Before we’d met again. Before the term even started.”

“And that somehow makes it acceptable? What sort of monster would make them to begin with?” I shake my head in awe. “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know me then. No one deserves that! No one deserves to have their future ripped away from them—”

“I thought you stole my future,” he says, his voice booming through the darkness. “My mother died thinking I’d betrayed her. She died, and she took away my hope, my joy, and my family because my father isn’t my family. I was alive, but my life was gone.” He gestures as if something’s vanished into thin air. “Gone.I couldn’t see anything but darkness and misery andyou. I wanted you to feel what I did. You said ballet was your only dream. My dream was to smother it and inject you with the same hopeless despair that I felt for years. I wanted you to be haunted too.”

“So you wouldn’t be alone in your misery?” I snort.

He nods unapologetically.

“But that’s exactly what you are, Gant.Alone.”

I don’t miss the flinch of his left eye at the last word.

Hastily, I rip at the bow that’s tied behind my neck so that the hospital gown slips down my freckled shoulders. “When I said you were dead to me, I meant it. I don’t want anything from you, including this medical care.”

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