For the first time since he’d dragged me here, my body melted instead of tensed, preparing for love not war.
He vibrated with fraying self-control as he ignored the hissing, hurting bond between us, tearing off the sensors from its sticky sheet and placing them firmly over my fingertips.
With each sensor he glued on me, I grew hotter, wetter.
With each caress of Sully’s touch, it made me want to slap him, then kiss him, then slap him all over again.
By the time he’d done all ten fingers, neither of us had control over our breathing, or the nightmare our bodies had shackled us with.
I was wet.
He was hard.
Yet we would find no satisfaction in the other.
There would be no kisses before he loaded me into the arms of another man. No tongue on my clit while he tried to convince himself he didn’t want me for himself.
I’d never seen him so resolute or pig-headed about a decision that would only bring aching regret.
With a fierce squeeze of my hand, he let me go, unable to look at me. Avoiding me as if he walked the narrowest road where if he veered off course, just for a second, he’d choose a different path.
A fork in our destinies that had appeared the moment we met.
Does he see it, too?
Did he see the different destinations on offer? The dark, dismal ending if we turned our backs on each other, compared to the bright, hopeful beginning if we fought to be happy?
It was a shame really.
Such a shame we were so similar in all the ways that mattered.
We had the same morals, same ethics, same personalities.
We could have been amazing together.
We could have been forever.
With a tummy-clenching grunt, Sully backed away from me. He balled his hands against the tug of togetherness. He revoked fate’s incessant pull.
Stubbornness ought to be a sin.
A deadly penance-earning, hell-inducing Biblical sin.
Then again, stubbornness could also be confused with pride. The way Sully braced his shoulders, standing tall and majestic, and embracing what his goddesses called him—an emperor upon this island—the more I didn’t know if it was pride that Sully refused to shatter or his stubbornness.
Either way…it would end whatever we had.
Yanking his phone from his trouser pocket, he planted his legs into a fortifying stance and typed on the small screen. He typed for longer than usual when loading me into Euphoria.
He typed so long that I grew impatient.
I wanted this over with.
I wanted some pill to swallow to remove him from my head and heart.
I wanted a drug—
Wait…
He didn’t give me elixir.
I looked up, studying him as he continued to type. His jaw set and eyes tight. His forehead furrowed with signs of his emotional exhaustion and inflexible stubbornness.
How had he forgotten to give me elixir?
And why did that worry me the most?
My heart kicked with worried flutters.
You know why.
I reached for the harness clasp around my waist. Sully typed a final sentence. His nostrils flared with pain.
Wait.
Wait!
I didn’t want to be sent to a guest without being high on elixir.
I didn’t want to have to sleep with someone as me and not an animal drowning beneath disgusting lust.
That lust kept me safe.
It turned sex for them into sex for me.
It gave me power. It gave me sanctuary. It gave me peace from my thoughts and allowed my body to rule.
Without elixir, I wouldn’t be mentally intact afterward.
I’d be broken.
Well and truly shattered and precisely what he wanted me to be.
His to use, abuse, and command.
Sully looked up, his thumb hovering over the button glowing on his screen.
I opened my mouth.
To beg for something I never thought I’d want.
Give me elixir, damn you.
Don’t gift me to someone and ask me to fuck them as me.
Eleanor wasn’t capable of being a whore.
But Jinx could.
Jinx had.
Jinx—
“Let’s see if you’re different, Eleanor Grace.” Sully raised his hand, the phone condemning me in his grip. “Let’s see, once and for all, if you can be trusted.”
“Sully, no—”
Too late.
His thumb came down.
The sensors blinded me, deafened me, stole me.
White.
Silent.
Nothing.
Chapter Eighteen
I WAS THE MASTER of sniffing out lies.
Thanks to Drake’s firm tutelage when we were kids, he ensured I’d learned that lesson very well. When he pulled me in for a hug because our parents walked into the room, I felt the fakeness of his embrace. When he shared his dessert because our mother glowered at him over the table, I tasted the phony sugar. When he punched me in the goddamn face, only to kiss my cheek as a concerned brother when our father caught us, I throbbed with the bruises of forgery.
Thanks to him, I knew every feeling of a lie.
The weight of it, the heat of it, the sound of it.
All lies had the same construction. The same level of hypocrisy mixed with beguiling misrepresentation. A lie was worse than any other danger because your own mind wanted so much to believe it. It wanted to accept the smarmy untruth, to believe the counterfeit tale.