Chapter Seventeen

––––––––

I PADDED BESIDE HIM.

I didn’t say a word as he stalked mercilessly down the lane.

My stomach ached.

It burned and snarled corrosive with denial at how swiftly things had been destroyed between us and full of barbwire knots at the blistering betrayal in Sully’s eyes.

The way he’d looked at me?

The pain.

The absolute horror.

It’d been a gunshot right into my useless heart.

Snatching his phone from his pocket, he called Cal as we continued walking in nasty silence. Cal answered straight away, his voice echoing loud enough for me to catch what he said.

“What’s up?”

Sully’s body was a coil. An explosive spring ready to detonate at any moment. “Tell the pilots they’re due to taxi Adam Marks back to Jakarta. He has a plane to catch.”

“Sure. Consider it done.” A pause before Cal asked, “Anything else?”

Sully narrowed his eyes, shooting me a glare. “Finalize the fantasy for Conrad Smithy.”

“I just finished the coding. But he’s not due in Euphoria until tomorrow.”

“I expect it to be loaded within twenty minutes.”

“Okay...” Cal’s voice changed to suspicion. “Why? What’s going on? He getting stroppy and wants an earlier fuck-fest?”

“Tell him I have a goddess ready and willing.” Sully’s hand tensed around his phone. Blackness filled his blue eyes as he bared his teeth in my direction. “She’s willing to work a double shift this week. Triple if there are guests requiring special care.”

Cal stayed silent for a moment before guessing far too much. “This goddess...it’s not Jinx, is it?”

Sully tore his furious gaze from me, striding faster.

I trotted to keep up with him. Partly because I didn’t want to make him any angrier than he already was and partly because I wanted to continue listening to their conversation.

“The one and fucking only,” Sully hissed. “She just volunteered.”

I wedged a fist in my belly.

Somehow, even if I hadn’t served a guest yet—thanks to Sully’s tampering—that seemed like it was all about to change. His temper was a monstrous entity clouding the sky, tainting the air with another thunderstorm. Electricity crackled between us, but this time, it wasn’t full of lust but rage. Shards of power crackled over his suit, his movements jerky with fury.

He wouldn’t forgive or forget.

Not until I’d sufficiently paid in pain and disgrace.

Cal muttered, “You let him fuck her and you’ll severely regret it.”

“Don’t tell me what the fuck I’ll regret, Calvin,” Sully snarled. “Have the cypher ready and keep your goddamn thoughts to yourself.”

“You’re the boss, sir. Consider it done.” Cal hung up.

Sully shoved his phone into his pocket and picked up his pace.

I jogged faster, running to my demise, my death, my doom.

* * * * *

“Go stand in the centre,” Sully snapped, shoving open the door to the Virtual Reality playroom of his Euphoria villa.

I didn’t try to argue or attempt to persuade him otherwise. The Sully who’d dropped a little of his barriers, allowing me to witness pieces of himself, had well and truly frozen me out. He’d returned to the ruthless bastard who’d force-fed me elixir, then made me sit on his fingers in delirious intoxication.

He’d shown no empathy then. He had no empathy now.

I swiftly made my way to the centre, standing beneath the delicate metal harness hanging from the ceiling.

Sully turned and closed the door behind him. Silence fell thicker as he kept his back to me, inhaling a huge gust of air before curling his hands and spinning to stalk toward me.

My mouth was dry as the beach, my tongue pierced by tiny shells and throat lodged by poisonous coral. If I had words to speak, I doubted I’d be able to give them sound.

I’d tried to convince him.

Even the guest who’d been the reason for this awful mess had vouched for me. Yet Sully’s ability to believe me was broken. Any faith I’d earned had just vanished like smoke from an extinguished candle. All that remained was the soot of our strange relationship and the waxy shards of consequences.

Without speaking, he pulled out his phone and pressed a button. Immediately, the harness descended, whirring gently to swing behind me.

I tensed, waiting for Sully to step into me and truss me up in the imprisonment. Maybe if his skin touched mine, if his body thought for him—rather than his battered ideals—we could stop this before it was too late.

However, unlike the other two times in Euphoria, he didn’t reach out to equip me himself. He didn’t take away my choices and dress me in sensors that stole my taste, touch, sight, hearing, and smell.

He made me do it.

“Take off your clothes and put the harness on.” His voice resembled an iceberg. Impenetrable, icy blue, and cold, cold, cold.

Heading toward the cupboards ringing the arena where sex took place between two people who saw an entirely different world to the one we currently resided in, he yanked open a door and removed a trolley full of black boxes with a purple orchid stencilled on the top.

The sensors.

Swallowing hard, my stomach ached even worse. A tumbling, tightening mess of worry of what would happen after this and an excruciating feeling of loss.

I’ve lost him.

Before I’d even had him.

Tears prickled my gaze, but I sniffed them back and did what he’d asked. Grabbing fistfuls of my dress, I pulled it over my head and threw it to the side. Standing in a turquoise bikini, I undid the bows behind my nape and lower back, tossing the top piece aside and repeating with the bottom half.

Sully’s jaw locked as he stole a glance, bringing the trolley to a stop beside me.

He remained in his expensive suit, looking every bit a pissed-off mogul with no mercy. My nakedness dressed me in goosebumps. Not from the cold—the island was never cold—but from the coldness of the man who I’d given my heart to.

I’d rescued him from drowning.

I’d accepted his body into mine.

We’d shared parts of ourselves that we’d never shared before.

And to be on the precipice of throwing all of that away made me sadder than any other time in my life. Sadder than when I’d been stolen, trapped, and sold. Sadder than when I didn’t think I’d see Scott or my family again.

I was sad when my past had been ripped away, but now...now my future had been taken too and that was far, far worse.

Sully could’ve been a wonderful future. A future I would’ve gladly, gratefully accepted, turning my back on everyone else because he was worth it.

He was the singular reason I’d been put on this earth.

And also the reason I wished I’d never met him.

He’d awoken my heart only to pulverise it into dust.

Tears once again tried to spring. A well inside me, crashing with waves up the sides, doing its best to escape through my eyes. To make me weak. To make me beg all over again.

Damn man.

Damn—

“Put the harness on, Jinx.” His gaze tore itself off my breasts, his hands ruthlessly tearing open boxes.

“Don’t do this, Sully.”

His teeth glistened; his lips thin over sharp canines. “Your right to call me that has once again been revoked.”

“Sullivan, then.” I balled my hands, laughing a little crazily. “Mr. Sinclair.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“Nope. I have something to say to you.”

“I have no interest in—”

“I fucking love you, you son of a bitch.”

He refused to look at me, icing me out all over again.

This wasn’t how declarations were meant to go. Anger should never be the main ingredient in professing the terminal diagnosis of falling in love, but...so what. I embraced my rage, using it as a shield against his. “You know I love you. I know you do. You saw it the moment you looked at me after you laughed on the boat yesterday.”

I tensed every muscle against the painful memory. The way he’d jolted when he’d read the message clear in my eyes. When he understood the unspoken language literally howling the truth in his face.

And he’d looked at me with the same raw connection. He’d tried to stop it. He’d gritted his teeth and looked away and returned to driving the boat as if nothing had happened.

But something had happened.

Something that could transcend this wreckage.

If he was prepared to fight for us...for me.

If he was ready to put his past behind him and choose a new kind of future where trust was the foundation that could sprout such happiness.

“You have nothing to say to me in return?” I hissed. “You’re honestly going to pretend you feel nothing?”

He ignored me, continuing to shred boxes apart and rip out their contents as if it was me he systemically destroyed.

“I love you, but I damn well hate you right now, Sully.”

His jaw clenched. His entire body seethed with the visible restraint of not entering into the war I was so desperate to have.

He wanted to prove he felt nothing?

He wanted to hurt me this much?

He wanted to throw me away without allowing common-sense and the truth to fix us?

Fine.

Fine!

“You’re a coward, Sullivan Sinclair. A goddamn coward.”

He stilled.

A subtle shift of sizzling tyranny settled into blistering self-control. His hands stopped massacring the boxes. His shoulders turned stiff, his very breath slowed from harsh to hardly at all.

Terrifyingly slowly, he turned to me. His eyebrows raised mockingly while his blue gaze remained on lockdown from feeling. “Interesting choice of words, Jinx.”

“What? Coward?” I narrowed my eyes. “No, actually, I think it’s the perfect one.”

“A dangerous slur to slander.”

“Truth is never dangerous.”

He smiled with daggers of frost. “Truth is the most dangerous thing of all.”

“Is that why you run from it?”

“It’s why I deal in lies.” He rolled his shoulders, doing his best to stay in control of the volcano I poked. “I created this island and filled it with hypocrisy and fraudulence. I embraced the fact that all life is a lie. All feeling is fiction. All trust ends up being deceit.”

“Trust is hardwired into us. It’s a fundamental law for co-existence.”

“And yet, I’ve survived just fine without it.”

“Trust me, you’re not fine.” I pressed a fist between my breasts, imploring him. “Survival is not happiness, Sully. Survival is a damn imposter for living. Truly living. To laugh. To be free. Can you not remember how good it feels to relax? To have faith. To trust.”

He laughed with a scary chill. “You ask me to do something I’ve proven is the one thing I am incapable of doing.”

“You’ve just trusted the wrong people.”

He swooped toward me, snatching my jaw with no sympathy. “I trusted those I called family.”

I flinched against his aggression. “Family doesn’t automatically earn a free pass.”

His eyes darkened until I stared into a black hole. “Family are supposed to be the one network that’s got your back.”

“Family we’re born into can make mistakes.” I struggled to speak with his tight grip on my jaw, but I wriggled until I had enough freedom to mutter, “Family we choose to share our life with can make mistakes. But the family you choose with your heart, your soul, that’s worth trusting. Trust is ninety-nine percent of what makes being in love so magical. To know you’ll be cared for in sickness and in health. To know they accept you...regardless of your flaws and—”

“Trust is the one reason I will never be in love.” His gaze flickered to my lips before narrowing back on mine.

“You’re already in love, Sullivan Sinclair. You’re just too chicken to admit it.”

His eyes snapped closed.

His fingers dug into my cheeks until I tasted blood. “I suggest you stop antagonising me before I do something we’ll both regret.”

“You’re already doing something you’ll regret.” I poked his unrelenting temper with a stupid twig of truth. I knew Sully had the potential of exploding. Of cracking the very earth I stood on, of suffocating me in smoke, of burying me in lava.

But it didn’t stop me.

It only made me wilder, stupider, reckless and careless and desperate.

Desperate to stop him from being such a stubborn asshole.

My temper had always gotten me into trouble. I’d kept it silent in Mexico. I’d done my best to keep it tethered around this man with unfortunate results.

But here?

Now?

I couldn’t contain the tempest inside me. I was the sea whipped by the wind. I was the sky pierced by lightning.

This could get me killed.

Or...it could save us from a mistake that would ruin both of us for life. Because if he did this—if he gave me to another man after our hearts had tangled into this messy, tricky chaos, then he would lose me.

As surely as I’d lost him.

Men in love don’t share.

Men like Sully, who wore possession like expensive diamond cufflinks, did not rent out the woman they’d chosen.

If he could do this.

If he could give me to another.

Then...what I felt for him was a lie.

And what he made me think he felt in return was the worst kind of forgery.

This whole damn island was full of deceit and distortion and the very myths he traded in.

And I was done trying to yank at the curtain, doing my best to get it to tumble down, frantic with the need to shatter the illusion Sully had trapped himself in.

The illusion that trust would hurt him. Trust would bruise and kick and punch him. Trust would kill his animals, his sanctuary, his heart.

My voice lost its heat, mimicking the ice he cast himself in. I arched my chin in his hold. I locked eyes with the one man I was made for, and hissed, “You make me serve a real guest, Sully, and whatever this is between us, is dead. No resuscitation. No reincarnation. I will never speak to you again. I will never look at you again. I will treat you as you’ve treated me. With disdain and impatience. I will turn my back on you when you summon me to serve. I will spit in your face if you touch me. I would rather sink to the bottom of the ocean than ever let you fuck me again.”

I sniffed, unable to hold back the two droplets of pure fury as they cascaded down my cheeks. “You do this, and you are invisible to me.”

His hand fell from my cheeks.

His chest strained in his suit. His arm trembled as he raked fingers through his bronze-tipped hair. Stumbling toward the trolley, he growled, “Put the harness on, Jinx.”

For a second, I heard a fairy-tale. I heard him say, ‘I love you with all my fucking heart. I’m sorry. You’re right. I do trust you.’

Instead, reality slapped me in the face, and I nodded with finality.

He chose to believe what he’d seen. That I’d betrayed him and given my name to a guest. He ignored my explanation. He rejected what Adam Marks had said.

He’d survived for too long without love or trust.

Jealousy was right.

Sullivan Sinclair was rushing headfirst toward a crash and burn break down. A burnout of his own making because he refused to allow anyone to carry a tiny piece of his heart.

I nodded slowly.

Another cloak of goosebumps settled.

My temper vanished with a silent scream of frustration.

My heart stopped thumping with violence and turned sick with loss.

So be it.

With sudden shakiness, I grasped the harness and quickly slipped it around my waist, shoulders, and thighs.

I didn’t look at him.

I kept my part of the bargain.

He was invisible.

He was nothing.

He’s gone.

Sully stood by as I secured the clasp, ruthless with silence.

The snap of the lock made me wince.

I let my arms fall to my sides, closing my eyes when Sully’s fingers grazed my belly, testing the latch, ensuring I’d obeyed and properly secured it.

With a fierce grunt, he passed me the small jar of oil. “Smear this over yourself.”

I swallowed back the sand and coral in my throat, ready to speak over the rubble left by our argument.  To ask why he didn’t do it himself.

But he’d made his decision.

And I’d made mine.

I would never speak to him again.

Snatching the jar, I tipped a glistening puddle into my spare hand and rubbed it over my skin. I kept my teeth gnashed together as I diligently spread and coated my entire body.

The silence festered between us, rotten and full of goodbye.

His nostrils flared as I passed back the empty jar.

His five o’clock shadow seemed darker around his mouth, shadows swallowing him whole. “You have to take responsibility for your actions, Jinx. This is entirely on you. I will not prepare you. I will not make this any easier on you.” He leaned forward, his body heat scalding my chill. “Trust isn’t given...it’s earned.”

My eyes snapped up.

What does he mean by that?

That I had a hope of earning it?

That this wasn’t as black and white as my normal dealings with him?

Keeping my stare, he held up another box.

The mouthwash.

I cracked the lid and swilled without complaint.

My mind that’d logically accepted my defeat and my heart that’d painfully cast him out, slowly nudged me alive with idiotic optimism.

Trust isn’t given...it’s earned.

Did he expect me to prove myself by sleeping with another man? Prove that I would do whatever he commanded?

What would that achieve?

That I’d finally accepted my place as his belonging and not a woman with her own free will and thoughts?

No...that doesn’t make sense.

I bit my bottom lip, trying to rip out his secrets with just a stare.

He avoided eye contact, handing me the roller of scent deception, waiting while I smeared it beneath my nose.

I passed it back, and he threw it onto the trolley. Selecting the box of earbuds, he shoved them into my hands.

This time, our eyes did lock. And the sea-blue of his gaze was as deep as an abyss filled with sharp-toothed sharks. He looked as if he wanted to bite me. To make me cry out. To make my vow to ignore him meaningless.

Keeping his threatening stare, I inserted the buds into my ears.

The room muffled, amplifying my own heartbeat and breath.

Sully took the empty box and handed me the eye lenses without a word. Our transaction was void of anything but clinical interaction.

Gingerly, I fumbled with how to insert them.

Sully held up a mirror, being patient while I unwillingly learned how to plant contacts over my pupils, flinching with foreignness, once again hating how my vision went hazy, waiting for my brain to figure out how to see past the unwanted film.

Only once I stopped blinking and could see enough not to be taken by surprise, did Sully put down the mirror and pick up the final box.

The fingerprint sensors.

The one thing I wouldn’t be able to do myself.

With a heavy inhale, he murmured, “Give me your hand.”

I braced myself and placed my fingers into his control.

The second our skin collided, a supercharged current of want and wicked hunger zapped from him to me. I winced as the power bolt fizzled up my arm, through my heart, and into my core.

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.