Page 64 of The Reveal
She’s his fix.
Augie has never been able to turn down a fix.
“Kneel,” the woman orders him.
And he does. I can see by the set of his shoulders that he’s embarrassed, but that doesn’t stop him. He doesn’t look back at me, either.
She does.
Making sure I’m watching, she pulls up the skirt she’s wearing and slices a long, deep cut into her inner thigh.
There’s no way for me tonotsee what she’s doing. And better yet, how my brother tilts himself forward and eagerly begins lapping at the cut she made. I can hear the sounds he makes as he does it. I can see the way he grips her leg as if there’s nothing more precious on this earth.
I feel my own gorge rise like a battering ram.
I don’t know how I manage not to be sick right there on the floor.
The vampire woman stands there, her legs spread wide, one taloned hand on my brother’s head as if he’s in need of guidance.
She wants me to look at him like this, I know it. Kneeling down, lapping at her, looking a lot like he’s licking her pussy. And maybe he does that, too. I don’t know. I don’twantto know. When I lift my gaze to the vampire’s, she stares at me.
“When you’ve seen enough,” she tells me, spite and malice all over her face and loud in her voice, “he wants to see you again. If I were you, I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”
And added to the long list of reasons I hate myself is this: I don’t simply walk away.
I bolt.
I leave my brother in the thrall of that bitch, and I sprint down that hallway of damp despair.
I don’t look into the cells as I go, but the things that I see anyway from the corner of my eye will stay with me for a long, long time.
I make it to the stairs and start to climb, making a kind of wheezing noise that might suggest I’ve been struck down with some kind of dungeon-inspired pneumonia, but it’s not that. It’s the only sobs I’ll allow myself.
I run up those cold stone steps, making my legs move faster than they want to go, and I hurtle myself through that barricaded door and throw myself through that revolting curtain that is definitely skin—
Then I slam straight into another cold wall.
But this time, it’s Ariel.
And for one long, wild, impossible moment, I feel a sense of relief so intense and so profound that I almost want to call itjoy.
I would, maybe, if he were ... anyone else.
He sets me back on my heels but keeps hold of me, gripping me just above my elbows. It’s all too chaotic. His touch is setting off the same explosions despite the terror and anguish and horror inside me. It shifts so suddenly and without warning to that shocking punch of lust and need that it makes me feel sick again.
“I’m going to throw up,” I warn him.
His face is stern. Sure. “I would not do that if I were you.”
So . . . I don’t.
I pull in a breath. That sick feeling inside me stretches wide, then—slowly—starts to subside.
I tell myself to pull away from him.
I don’t.
“What do you want with my brother?” I ask him. “I thought you needed him to pay you or something. But apparently he’s still happily addicted to vampire blood.” I shove that awful image of him on his knees from my head. Or I try. Then I dare ask the next question. “Are you turning him into one? Is that the point of all of this?”
