Page 14 of Claimed By the Rockstars: Part One
He blows a puff of air through his nose. He's so close, I feel it on my throat. "Alright. Let's say you don't know," he says in a low tone. "Let's say you're perfectly innocent and this is all Stephen Hughes' fucking fault. That you had no clue he'sstealing music from the dead. But you knownow." His lip curls into a sneer. "So itwillbe your fault if you don't stop."
"I can't just tell him the band won't perform what he?—"
"Not. My. Problem." Each word is punctuated by his thumb pressing harder against the scar through my collar.
"Or what?" I manage to rasp.
"Or I tell everyone exactly what you are. Your career as Bells? Dead. Your fanbase? Gone. The Reverie? They'll drop you so fast you'll get whiplash." He leans in closer, his breath whispering against my ear. "Everythingyou've built as Bells goes up in flames."
That's it. That's fucking it.
I bring my knee up hard, aiming for his balls, but he twists at the last second and it catches his thigh instead. Still enough to make him grunt and loosen his grip. I slash with the knife and the blade catches the edge of his mask where the leather strap attaches by his ear.
The strap tears.
Time slows to nothing as Rex's mask shifts, sliding sideways like a door opening on something that was never meant to be seen. My blade catches flesh, warm blood sprays my hand. But it's what I see in that split second before his hand flies up that freezes me in my tracks.
Scars. Not just scars, total destruction. I don't fully process what I'm seeing before his hand flies up, covering the right side of his face with fingers splayed wide like he's trying to hold his face together.
The sound he makes isn't human.
It's raw animal rage mixed with terror. His visible eye goes wide, the ice blue turning almost black with dilated pupil, and I know with absolute certainty that I've just crossed a line that can't be uncrossed.
"Don't—" I start, but he's already moving.
He lunges in my direction with the force of a freight train, letting out an inhuman snarl that says he's beyond pain now, operating on pure instinct, and that instinct is telling him to destroy the threat.
To destroyme.
I scramble backward, my knife—no, wait, where's my knife? My hand is empty, slick with his blood but empty, and I don't have time to look for it because he's coming at me again. His hand is still pressed to his face, but he moves like a predator, using his body to block my escape routes, herding me deeper into the maintenance tunnel.
I run.
The tunnel stretches ahead, branching off into darkness. The surreal glow of those fucking emergency lights makes distances hard to judge. My boots slam against the concrete floor, echoing like gunshots, but his footsteps are right behind me.
Heavy. Relentless. Getting closer.
A door appears on my left and I grab the handle, yanking hard. Locked. Of course it's fucking locked. I keep running, my lungs burning, ribs screaming where the binder left its marks. Another door—this one opens, and I throw myself through it into what looks like a storage area. Metal shelving units tower toward the ceiling, forming narrow shadowed aisles.
I can hear him behind me, breathing hard, and when I dare a glance back, that hand is still pressed to his face like he's holding himself together. The door slams open so hard it bounces off the wall, and his silhouette fills the frame.
"Is this what you wanted?" His voice is different now, lower, rougher, like he's talking through broken glass. "To see the monster beneath the mask?"
My hands search the shelves blindly, finding boxes of paper, cleaning supplies, nothing useful—wait. There. A crowbar, probably left by maintenance. My fingers wrap around the coldmetal and I grip it like a baseball bat, ready to cave his head in if he gets too close.
A poor substitute for my knife. The one my grandpa gave me before he died, engraved with a simple scripted letterBfor Bella. Now for Bells. "Every girl needs fangs," he'd said, the only person in my family who ever gave a shit about me as a person instead of a meal ticket.
And it's gone. Somewhere in that tunnel with Rex's blood on it.
Fuck.Fuck.
The crowbar feels wrong in my hands, too heavy, too impersonal. That knife was the last piece of the only person who ever saw me, and now that psycho has it.
Rex's footsteps echo through the storage room, measured and deliberate. Not rushing anymore. He knows I'm trapped in here with him, knows there's only one door and he's blocking it. The crowbar feels slippery in my sweaty grip as I press myself deeper into the shadows between two shelving units.
Fuck. I'm going to have to kill Rex fucking Steele.
"I know you're in here." His voice carries through the maze of metal shelves, that roughness from before mixed with something else. Exhaustion. Pain. "So I'm going to make one thing perfectly clear."
