Page 240 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
“Are you worried your parents will find out? Mine already have? Who gives a fuck? We’re grown ups, even if our parents are psychos who might kill us.”
Just as expected, those pretty blue saucer eyes of hers widened. “You really are insane,” she said again. “You nearly got us both killed then, and that was bad enough, but if anyone knew you were here…now…”
She seemed different.
Elaine seemed different.
Scared to a whole new tune. One I hadn’t seen in her before.
It was then that I looked beyond her to the coffee table next to her designer leather couch. It was then that I saw the concoction of sleeping pills and other bottles of meds waiting in a row next to a half-empty bottle of champagne.
And more…
A scrawled letter, complete with the fountain pen cast down at the side…
I headed close enough to investigate and picked up one of the bottles. Diazepam. A whole jar full of them that I shook in my hand.
“Going to bail out, were you?” I asked her. “This is how you’re planning on ditching your life, to save the Power brothers the effort?”
“It’s got fuck all to do with the Power brothers,” she said in a hard voice, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m doing what I want, because I want to.”
But she was lying. Just like always.
If she’d really, truly wanted to kill herself tonight she’d have done it instead of letting me up.
She didn’t want to kill herself. She wanted me.
She’d wanted me since she’d first set eyes on me at Tinsley Constantine’s ball.
We stared at each other, both of us sizzling with generations of family hate and vitriol. Both of us despising everything the other one stood for. Both of us knowing that anything other than malice between us was at odds with everything we stood for as human beings.
“Leave,” she told me, and this time her eyes flared with a new round of shame. “You can sleep happily tonight, knowing there’s one less Constantine in the world.”
“Very dramatic.”
“Thanks for that.” It was then that she noticed my bandaged hand. “What’s that? Get into a fight with some boardroom member. Is that it?”
I stepped up closer to her and breathed in her scent. “Why are you such a little fool?”
Her eyes were brimming with tears, even though her jaw was gritted tight. “Fuck you, Lucian. Fuck you, and fuck off. I don’t want anything the fuck to do with you, and never have.”
I backed her up into the wall, pinning her tight.
“Such a liar,” I snarled. “Such a dirty little liar. You can’t resist me. You’ve not been able to resist me since the first moment you laid eyes on me at your sister’s sad party.”
“Interesting accusation,” she said. “Consideringyou’rethe one standing inmyapartment, even though you’d be dead if anyone so much as got a sniff you were here.” I saw that flash of need in her eyes, and it was the one that set me on fire. The one that always set me on fire.
It was her masochistic need for hurt. The woman who wanted to suffer at my hands.
“Seriously,” she whispered. “Fuck off.”
“You’re really going to overdose over a debt to the Power brothers?”
She shrugged, squirming her body tight against mine. Her breaths were in my face, and her eyes were still glassy. Hurt. “I’m going to overdose because I want to. I’m done with the whole sorry state of my existence. What’s the point of it?”
I tugged her nightdress up around her thighs, and swallowed as I saw the beauty of the fresh slashes on her flesh. “An overdose would be such a waste.”
“Great, so I shouldn’t die because you want to fuck me?”
