Page 25 of Flesh & Divinity

Not gone.

Never gone.

But underneath it, something opens the thing I saw at the bluff that she tried to bury the moment she caught herself feeling it.

“I hate that you’re right,” she says.

“I know.”

Duke’s hand slides to her waist and lifts and she goes with him, wrapping her legs around him now with the easy familiarity of a woman who has learned this particular body by heart. Jaq moves with them, and I watch the three of them find their rhythm the way they always do. I feel the particular, devastating tightness in my chest that has been building since the first night in the pumpkin field and has not once loosened its grip.

We’re in trouble.

All three of us.

And from the wrecked, wondering look on her face when she catches me watching, still watching after everything, so is she.

She reaches out to me.

Not to fight. Not to play a game. Just reaches, her hand open, and waits.

I take it.

And whatever was supposed to be revenge begins, quietly and irrevocably, to become something else entirely.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CINDER

Hunger overrides my need for answers.

Every question I had about tonight, about the look on Daddy's face when he stood across from me, about the unique quality of his voice when he said it was supposed to be. All of it dissolves the moment brother's hands find my waist, takes me from boyfriend, then flips me around and pulls me back against him on the kitchen table. I peer up at him over my shoulder and the look in his eyes unravels something in my chest that has nothing and everything to do with want simultaneously.

I am already ruined and they have barely touched me.

This is different.

I feel it in the way Daddy's fingers now feather across the top of my tits, unhurried, deliberate, like he has all night and intends to use every second of it. There is no urgency in him right now. No hunger dressed up as punishment. This is something else. Something that sits underneath all the hatred and the things neither of us will say out loud and feels, terrifyingly, like care.

Something shifted in them tonight.

I don't know what broke open or when exactly it happened, whether it was the horn or the bluff or the moment Daddy stood across from me at that table and looked at me like I was something he was deciding what to do with rather than something he had already decided. They are not the same men who locked me in that collar and told me my holes were theirs whenever they wanted them.

Or maybe they are exactly those men.

Maybe this was always underneath it.

Brother's chest is warm against my back. Daddy is now firmly and intentionally in front of me. Boyfriend's gaze from beside me is a pressure all its own—steady, focused—the particular quality of attention that makes me feel simultaneously seen and undone. The three of them together are an inferno I have been circling since the first night on this island, and I am done pretending I want to find a way around it.

I want to walk straight into it.

I want to burn.

Daddy's fingers find the hem of my shirt and he begins to work it upward slowly, with a patience that is almost cruel. My chest rises and falls rapidly. The kitchen is warm from the fire and warmer still from the three of them surrounding me, and I feel the heat building from somewhere deep and insistent.

“You're shaking, Cinder Soot,” brother murmurs against my ear.

“I know,” I breathe back.