I was wrong.
Trash Whore. That’s who I was to him now. That’s who I was to everyone.
I couldn’t get those words out of my head as I pulled open his door and slammed it behind me. I heard him curse as he nearly crashed into it, before yanking it open again. He threw the door closed, making it hit the frame so hard that the windows rattled.
“Scar! Get the fuck back here!”
I looked over my shoulder, seeing him racing after me, and I stopped all pretense and just started running. But he was on me before I could make it to the stairs. His hands wrapped around my shoulders and then the force of my momentum and his added weight sent me careening into the wall.
“Get off me!” I screamed, trying to buck out of his hold.
But he just wrapped one arm around my middle, pinning me in place.
“Just fucking stop for one goddamn second and tell me what’s going through your head!” he yelled, making me wince.
“You! You’re going through my head!” I snapped back, my face on fire with fury and pain. “I’m not your fucking Trash Whore, and you know it! So why’d you have to say that? Out of everything, why that?”
I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted salt on my lips.
He froze behind me, while I couldn’t seem to hold still. I braced my hands against the wall, and, using my leg strength from years in gymnastics, I tucked a leg between his and hooked my leg around his. I then bent my knees and used all my strength to take him down.
His knees bent from the surprise force, and he fell back on his ass, his hands automatically reaching out to try to catch his fall. I immediately bounced up, but before I could get away, he snagged a hand around my ankle and tugged. I fell forward, my hands catching me, and then I was flipped over and his body was over mine. It was exactly like the night of the murder, when he’d caught me and pinned me down.
“I hate you,” I spat at him.
His brown eyes tracked my every tear. “No, you don’t.”
And that was the crux of it. He was absolutely right.
“Shut up!” I screamed in his face.
“No, you fucking shut up,” he snarled, moving so a hand took hold of my jaw. “You are not a Trash Whore. Alright? You’re not, and I’ve never once thought you were.”
His words stunned me, and I stopped struggling beneath him for a moment to let them sink in. We lay there, panting, watching each other, and my furious pain mixed with the blooming heat between us.
“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” I told him.
“I am,” he nodded unabashedly. “But not about this.”
Hearing him say that he didn’t think I was trash did something to me. Despite everything, I still cared what they thought about me. What he thought about me. And this, right here? Maybe it was fucking stupid, but him fighting me showed that he at least cared enough to fight.
“You drive me fucking crazy,” he admitted.
“I despise you,” I lied.
Instead of getting pissed, he grinned. “Yeah?” he taunted, and he moved his hips, letting me feel how hard he still was. I bit my lip, and his eyes immediately dipped to my mouth. “If I touched you right now, I bet I’d find that you’re soaking wet for me. I bet you don’t despise me at all.”
In response, I drove my hips up, grinding against his erection, forcing him to let out a groan. “Looks like you’re having trouble despising me, too,” I jeered.
“So, what do you want to do about it?” he challenged.
I knew what I wanted. It was just too fucked up for me to admit out loud.
But Rogue never let me off the hook. He saw what I wanted, because he’d always been able to read me like a book. “Say it.”
I shook my head, and he ground himself against me once more, his dick hitting my clit, causing harsh friction against our clothing, and I shuddered.
“Say it, Scar,” he said, rocking back and forth.
I leaned up, gathered his scruffy skin along his jawbone between my teeth, and bit down hard. “Fucking hell, just say it!” he snapped, jerking away from me.
“I want you to prove that you don’t think I’m a Trash Whore, you asshole!” I shouted into his face. “I want you to fuck all of the bad memories out of me. And I want to make you hurt the way you made me hurt,” I growled, my breasts pressing against his chest every time I took a gasping breath.
His eyes glittered down at me with bitterness. I looked back at him with enmity. We inhaled each other’s want, and exhaled a hostile desire that we couldn’t fight.
He was the king of cruel, and I basked in his reign.
“Then do it,” he told me.
So I did.
I reached up and grabbed him by the hair, yanking strands out in my strong grip as I forced his mouth on mine. He didn’t try to pull away. Not even when I devoured him whole, my teeth sinking into his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. I licked the red with the tip of my tongue, tasting him, relishing in the copper tang that gave me power.
I moved my hands to the bottom of his shirt and pulled, his mouth ripping away from mine so that I could toss it away. I wanted to feel his skin. I needed to feel him against me, so that the coldness in my soul could thaw out from our torrid tempers.
Rogue countered my movement by pulling my own shirt up and over my head. My sports bra was tight against my breasts, my cleavage on full display as the material bit into my skin in an uncomfortable way. I arched up again, showing him what I wanted. He obliged by grabbing hold of the front of my bra with both hands. Then he ripped.
The material gave way to his muscular arms, and he tossed it away, and holy fuck, it was the single most hottest thing I’d ever experienced in my life. It was animalistic and dominating, and so damn sexy.
In the next second, he hauled me to my feet. I kicked off my sneakers and shoved him in the chest as hard as I could, making him stumble back. He straightened, and with only a couple feet between us, we stared each other down like two predators poised to attack.
His intense eyes dragged up and down my body, and I flicked my gaze over his chiseled chest and abs, admiring the dark lines of his tattoos that crept over his skin. The tattoo on his left pec was smaller than his hand, and was just a simple black square. It had been the first tattoo he’d gotten, when he was fifteen. All four of the Heirs had gotten the same one, in different places. It represented the four of them and their brotherhood. But my eyes immediately honed in on what was now in the center of the Heir square. A blood-red crown.
My gaze shot up to him. “What is that?”
“You know what it is.”
I could see the crown, and half of my brain understood that he’d gotten it for me. Every piece of jewelry, shirt or souvenier the guys had ever gotten me had some form of a crown poised on it. I was once the Queen of the Heirs, or so they dubbed me with that title when we were kids. But as I stared at the tattoo, I couldn’t register what it meant. He hadn’t had that before. We’d been hanging out in Bonham’s hot tub just the week before they threw me away, so I would’ve seen it. Which means he’d gotten this tattoo after. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know if this was just another elaborate way to fuck with me or not. So because I didn’t trust him, not for a single second, the symbolism that he’d marked on his body made my temper blaze even hotter.