Page 9 of Breaking Ophelia
She’s not even pretty, not by Westpoint standards. Soft in places that should be sharp. Her hips spill over the sides of the chair, her posture a little too relaxed for this place. Not a runner. Not a fighter. When she stretches, the hem rides up and her stomach creases, her stomach spilling over her jeans.
I should be bored. She’s nothing. A player, deposited to pay off her father’s debts. She isn’t competition, not even a target.
But I can’t look away.
Her lips move as she reads. I wonder if she does it at home, or just here, to annoy the girls who hate her. There are ways to survive at Westpoint; being invisible, or being so grotesquelyvisible that nobody wants to touch you. She’s picked wrong. The other girls whisper when she passes, and the faculty are worse. I saw one of the janitors spit into her mop water after Ophelia walked by.
She turns a page. The sleeve falls to her elbow. The skin there is marked—small, oval scars, maybe from a curling iron, or a mother who loved cigarettes more than children. The effect is unguarded, unfinished. I curl my hand around the balcony rail and squeeze until the veins pop. The iron is cold, but I can feel my own pulse through it.
An urge overcomes me to destroy whoever marked her like that.
She’s not supposed to matter. She’s a file on the Dean’s desk, a future compliance officer at some dead-end company, or more likely a dropout. But watching her, I feel the bones of my jaw tighten, the pressure climb behind my eyes. I imagine her in the woods during the Hunt—bare legs, panic sweat, a tangle of hair caught in the thorn brush. I imagine her tripping, eating dirt, looking up with a mouth full of blood and crying for a father who’d already sold her off.
She’d make a fucking fantastic spectacle.
Especially when I shove my cock in that sweet cunt and claim her as the woman to carry on my bloodline.
Fuck me.I don’t know how The Board knew she’d be my poison, how her curvy little body would seep into my veins, but they did.
She’s not at all my type, and yet something about her makes my blood boil.
My cock throbs and begs me to split her open, pump her full of cum. Make her round, rounder, with my children.
Fuuuuuuuck.I should hate her.
I do. I do hate her. I hate everything she is. Poor. Unworthy.
She deserves every punishment I will dole out because women like her are the unruly kind that aren’t valued by men like me.
She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and the line of her throat pulses with the movement. I trace the distance from her neck to her clavicle, then down, mentally mapping every inch I could bruise, every tendon I could snap. That’s how I learned to control the world—by knowing exactly how and where it would break.
My vision narrows. For a moment, the room is just the two of us, her flipping pages, me imagining the sound her voice would make as her ass claps against me. A heat gathers under my skin. My breath won’t slow, even though I order it to. I drag my nails against the inside of my palm, hard enough to leave grooves.
She dog-ears a page. That’s when I know she’s doing it on purpose, as if mutilating a library book is some tiny rebellion. I nearly laugh, but the sound would echo.
She stretches again, rolling her shoulders, and this time I watch the bra strap slip into view. It’s the wrong color for the shirt—plain black, not even a brand. I wonder what it would feel like to wrap my fingers around her neck and squeeze until she made a noise. Would she scream, or go limp, or try to fight?
I count her blinks: six per minute, every one lazy, slow. Her face isn’t nervous, exactly, but there’s a tension in her mouth that says she’s waiting for the next bad thing. She’s been trained for disappointment. Maybe that’s why I hate her, or maybe I just want to see how far she can bend before she snaps.
My eyes are dry as I forget how to blink. I don’t allow myself the luxury. I watch until my pupils ache with the strain of holding her in place.
When she finally gathers her books and stands, I grip the railing so hard it leaves a pattern in my skin. For a half-second, I picture her legs buckling, picture me catching her by the hair and jerking her back to her seat. I picture the room emptying, the lights dying, the only thing left her breath and my hand around her neck.
Instead, I keep my hands at my side and watch her leave, hips swaying, steps uneven on the stone floor as she heads to the computer. She glances up at the balcony once, eyes lingering just left of where I stand.
She can’t see me, but she knows I’m there.
She sits, typing away until she nods and heads to the back, coming back with a folder and sitting back in her spot, opening her notebook and grabbing a pen.
I file the moment away. Later, I’ll use it. For now, I exhale, slow and steady, until the pounding behind my eyes fades. I check my nails—half-moons of skin and blood packed under the tips.
She’s not a runner. But she will be.
And when she runs, I’ll be waiting.
I barely hear him come up the stairs. Typical—Colton could break into a bomb shelter and never trip a wire. He’s the kind of silent that feels evolutionary, the kind bred in because it keeps your throat uncut at three in the morning.
He leans into my field of view, ghost-white and half-shadow, eyes blacked out by the slant of light from above. For a second we don’t speak, and the only noise is the air conditioner and the soft cough of pages turning below.
