Page 44 of Goldsin

And with those chilling words, I know there is no more escaping the Harrows.

This has become a game of chance. I’ll either die at his hands or his father’s.

The chilly night air greets me like a slap in the face asJulian dumps me abruptly onto the damp forest floor. My tears and my sorrow reach a boiling point, and I push myself up. My hands slip slightly on the wet leaves covering the ground as I glare up at him with all the anger I can muster.

“Are you done throwing me around like a rag doll?”

The forest is eerily silent. The shadows swallow us whole as we stand among the trees.

“Start talking.” Icy blue eyes fix on me with an intensity that makes it feel like he’s peering straight into my soul. “Why did you kill DeMarco?”

“Julian, I told you, I’m not?—”

He cuts me off with a snarl. “Let’s try this one last time.” His voice echoes through the darkness. Jaw clenching, his hand snakes behind my back, untangling the knot of the makeshift bra and leaving me naked as he ties my hands with it instead, knotting the blindfold behind my back.

The material bites at my skin. I fight the urge to plead for the other version of Julian—the one whose mouth was tasting every dip of my body just half an hour ago.

“You think I don’t know what’s going on? You think I can’t see how you’ve wormed your way into this part of our lives?” His hand gathers my ponytail and he pulls, tilting my neck at an uncomfortable angle.

My neck’s bare, inviting his teeth to mark the unmarred skin.

“Julian, please, just let me explain,” I try again, but the cold, hard look in his eyes tells me any attempt at reasoning with him will be futile.

He’s too far gone, consumed by the darkness that hasalways lurked beneath the surface of his carefully crafted façade.

“Explain?” he scoffs, pulling my face closer to his. “How do you explain getting a party invitation from the daughter of the Inferno Consortium? How do you explain DeMarco dying of poison, his body found with dried blood coughed out all over his thousand-dollar suit—and a drop on this very spot?” His finger travels up from my waist to my breast, flicking past my nipple. He pinches the skin above it, leaving a red mark resembling the bead of blood. “What the hell were you hoping to achieve by killing him?”

“Nothing!” I cry out, feeling the weight of his gaze bearing down on me like a physical force. “Because I did not fucking kill him!”

“Don’t test me, Aurelia.”

I refuse to let him break me. I’ve come too far, sacrificed too much, to give up now.

I meet his gaze defiantly, refusing to back down. “We can go on all night,” I spit.

A sudden flash of black catches my attention—something familiar on his wrist—and I remember the hair tie I saw on him earlier tonight. Something inside me snaps, and I lose myself amidst all the pain and anger I’ve been struggling to contain.

He doesn’t expect it. Yet his reflexes are fast. His hand falls from my hair and stops my knee from meeting his groin.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of sick joke?” My voice trembles with rage. “Wearing that tonight, of all nights?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hair tie!” I push my knee up again, aiming for his dick in the hope of getting a hit.

But he stops me just in time. Then he flips me around, my back against his chest as he holds me still, his hand wrapped around my hair to pull my head back so he can look down at me.

“Why are you wearing it now?” I screech. “You bastard! What were you trying to obtain? Did you hope things would go back the way they were if I saw you with it?”

“Believe it or not, Aurelia, not everything is about you,” he retorts.

But there’s a hint of something in his voice that makes me pause.

“I never took it off.”

“Never?” The word comes out as a whisper.

My eyes glaze over as I think back to one of those tedious social events we were forced to attend when I was seven and he was ten.

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