CHAPTER 24: DEREK
I hated the tension. Since she moved into my bedroom, Sofia and I naturally developed a familiarity to each other. There wasn’t even any awkwardness to begin with. It was like we just knew how to adjust to each other. Of course, there were times when I was greatly tempted to take a sip of her blood, but it wasn’t anything a glass of blood couldn’t fix.
The night Ben arrived, however, it was like we’d become strangers to each other. The large room suddenly felt too small for the two of us. Any form of balance we’d developed over time completely disappeared. She was slipping away from my fingers by the minute.
Finally, she was lying down on her side of the bed while I sat over the edge of mine, fully intending to lose myself in a book.
She was the one who eventually broke the silence.
“Thank you, Derek. For what you did.”
I had no desire to talk about the boy, so I ignored her thankfulness and changed the topic.
“Lucas approached you earlier. What did he tell you?”
“Nothing,” she responded a little too quickly. “You know your brother… says a lot of meaningless things.”
“From the way you reacted, what he said looked far from meaningless.” I remembered what Corrine told me about Sofia’s psychological condition and how it was impossible for her not to remember what happened the night she was attacked.
“Has he been hurting you, Sofia?”
She didn’t respond. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” I gripped the sheets of the bed, wondering why I was asking questions whose answers I wouldn’t even know how to act on.
“Has he?”
Sofia sat up on the bed and gripped my wrist.
“Why are you acting like this? You’ve seen Lucas and I interact countless times.”
“Interact? Is that what you do with Lucas?”
I knew I was being irrational and unreasonable, but the image of Sofia with Ben embracing was burning away all rational thought and reason in my mind.
“Has something been going on between you and my brother, Sofia?”
“Me and Lucas?!” She said it through gritted teeth, like it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever heard of. “That’s madness, Derek. I would never…”
I moved fast, pushing her on her back over the bed. I quickly grabbed her wrists and pinned them with one hand over her head and knelt on the bed, straddling her hips.
Her eyes grew wide in question.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a small, broken voice. “Wait! Don’t…”
I grabbed her jaw non-too-gently. It was the first time I could remember treating her in an untoward fashion since the attack the first time I ever set eyes on her. I felt like I was losing her and that it was beyond my control. I wanted to regain some form of control and unreasonable as it was, I was taking my agitation out on her.
“You’re mine, Sofia. Many things have changed between us, but that hasn’t changed.”
She didn’t respond. Instead, she just looked at me in a way she hadn’t in a long time. She looked at me with fear.
That woke me up from my momentary burst of insane rage. I let go of her and got off her, feeling like the biggest jerk ever to walk the earth. I couldn’t even look at her. I couldn’t even bear being in the same room with her. I didn’t deserve her.
I knew that I was lying when I reminded her that the fact that she was mine hadn’t changed. No matter what alpha male act I could pull off in trying to intimidate her, I knew the truth. She was no longer mine. In fact, it was the exact opposite. At some point during all those times I’d spent with her, I’d become hers.