Page 13 of Stray
Then there was Ella.
There was always Ella.
Fucking Ella.
From the moment she’d come into his world, she’d been a nuisance, first because she was the annoying little stray who’d always tried to insert herself in whatever he and his siblings were doing, as if she actually belonged there, and then for entirely different reasons.
As they got older, Ella had stopped trying to hang around Axel and Lyra. She’d stopped giving him those big doe eyes every time he had friends over, before he shut the door in her face.
Then, things changed. While he was busy ignoring her,shechanged.
The scrawny, bug-eyed brat who used to piss him off grew up and she became the walking, raven-haired temptation who sauntered past him in a bathrobe every morning after he’d spent the night dreaming about her. She was all curves and forbidden edges Axel knew he’d get cut on if he ever tried to touch her, and he hated her for it.
No. Hate wasn’t a strong enough word. If he could have erased every last trace of Ella Doe from the earth, he would have done it and maybe, just maybe, it would be enough to erase her from his mind.
Of all the fleabitten strays his mother could have rescued, it had to beher. It couldn’t have been the neighbors, where at least she’d have been a safe distance away, still torturous but tolerable if he gritted his teeth and kept the blinds shut.
The lust was only part of the fucked-up cocktail of misfiring hormones and traitorous neurochemicals that had pushed him to move into the dorms as soon as the opportunity arose.
Of infinitely greater concern was the fact that his heart had decided it owned her on the eve of his sixteenth birthday.
Axel remembered right down to the second, maybe not the moment it all began, because it was a slow, encroaching process just like the plague, but the moment he lost power over it.
The moment his soul stopped being his own and started being a hole in the shape of her.
Over the last few years, he had become a world class expert in pretending like she didn’t exist, and when that failed, convincing himself that he hated her for reasons other than the fact he couldn’t have her.
And hell, he’d even convinced himself. He still felt that traitorous blend of arousal and longing whenever she was near, but at least he’d conditioned himself to feel spite right alongside it. That made it easier.
Sometimes.
Now all the rules had changed.
Marissa wasn’t the one.
If he hadn’t been so stunned by the revelation that night, Axel would have put an end to whatever was left ofthemthen and there, but he hadn’t. Now it was just dragging on like a corpse under the wheel of a car, and he was too much of a coward to look back and see the damage.
The only thing keeping him from ending it now was the fact that Marissa hadn’t been back to school since the ceremony, and rumor had it, Ella was going to be discharged from the hospital soon. There was a good chance she’d show up at the Academy before Marissa, and that wasreallygoing to be a mess, but breaking up with her over the phone wasn’t something he was willing to do, if only because he didn’t want to be known as “that guy.”
She wasn’t answering his texts, anyway. Most of their time together at home was spent at her place, and there was no way Mrs. Waterson was going to be in the mood for company. The Academy was ironically more structured than their parents’ houses, and a getaway fling was easier to come by at home.
Marissa’s parents always looked the other way. So would Axel’s mother, for that matter. He told himself he never brought girls home because he didn’t want to expose Lyra to their inevitable walk of shame the morning after, but Ella factored in more than he would have liked to admit.
He wasn’t even sure why. Of all the ways he took pleasure in rubbing her lowly status in, he’d never been able to find satisfaction in parading his lovers around for her to see. Her interest in him was as plain as the button nose on her face, and he knew it would be the perfect revenge for all the crimes she’d committed that he still couldn’t put a name to, but he never did.
Every now and then, he’d let himself wonder why. Not for too long, because the answer that kept popping up over and over again like a sprouting weed was the irrational fear that somehow those wide, piercing eyes would see through to the fact that it washerhe pictured whenever he was fuckingthem.
Learning Ella was the marked one had turned his world upside down more than his father’s death ever had, and getting closure wasn’t going to be half as easy.
He’d done some soul searching since the accident, once he’d been turned away from the hospital by that damn priestess who’d taken it upon herself to be the patron saint of Ella. There was no way to proceed but forward.
Hewouldbe King, and he needed an Empress to do it. The fact that it was Ella and not Marissa simply required a restructuring of his current strategy.
And his brain, for that matter. Was it even possible to stop hating the stray when that hatred was the only thing that kept him sane around her?
It wasn’t a question that had an easy answer, but he would wait for her to show up at the Academy and go from there. She was already head over heels for him and had been as long as anyone could remember.
How hard could winning her over really be?
