The Winning Shot

CHAPTER ONE

XANDER

I can't breathe. I try. I so desperately try, but I can't.

The hand gripping my throat tightens with every second, suffocating me, taking all the oxygen from my lungs. The oxygen I need to live. The oxygen I no longer want.

I don't want it because surviving tonight will only mean that it'll happen again. He'll hurt me again. Just like he's doing it now—taking what he wants, not giving a single fuck about me.

I'm frighteningly aware that this moment will be engraved into my brain just like the previous one or the one before that. They're all there, right at the forefront of my mind, with every gut-wrenching detail.

I try to focus on anything other than him and the pain, but everything in our surroundings—the sound of water streaming down on us, the wet and slippery shower floor underneath our feet, my muffled cries echoing off the walls—brings my thoughts back to the fact that I've been reduced to nothing more than someone's toy. A toy you can treat like shit and get away with it just because it's yours.

He groans loudly, his mouth inches from my ear, making me shudder with self-disgust. I hate it. I hate how much pleasure my agony gives him. I hate how his other hand grasps my hip, fingers digging into the skin with bruising force and the explicit purpose of leaving a mark. He always makes sure to leave a mark—bruises on my ass and hips, handprints on my throat, scratches everywhere else—because that's his favorite way of torturing me afterward.

"Have fun covering that up," he would say, his voice filled with animosity. "I don't need to remind you to keep your damn mouth shut, do I?"

And I would only nod, unable to speak or even take a deeper breath because of the crushing weight of shame, guilt, and humiliation on my shoulders.

I close my eyes and silently beg—and pray, for all it's worth—the time to speed the fuck up. But it doesn't. If anything, I swear it slows down. Seconds become minutes, and minutes stretch into hours as though this whole mess wasn't already feeling like a whole fucking eternity.

He seizes my throat harder, and I know he's close.

I try to hold back any sound that threatens to escape me, but I fail, allowing the painful whine to escape my lips. And when his moves falter, that's when I know I fucked up. I know it because the pressure on my neck becomes deathly, almost enough to squeeze the life out of me.

I don't care how pathetic it sounds—I want exactly that to happen.

He forces my head back and leans in. "One more sound and I won't be so gentle." Then he pulls me away, slamming my body against the tiled wall. Hard. So hard, my vision goes dark. I can't see anything. It's pitch black.

And the deeper I dive into the lightless abyss, the less I hear, the less I feel, which only makes me want to keep diving. But it's not long until I'm pulled back to reality.

I wake up, gasping for air, and the amount of available oxygen suddenly becomes too much. I start coughing to remind my lungs how they're supposed to work, but all my efforts seem futile.

For a few long minutes, I just sit on my bed, tangled in the sheets, completely paralyzed. In the silence of my room, I can distinctly hear the rapid pounding of my heart, and as I try to count the thuds, I get lost somewhere between pretty sure a human heart isn't supposed to beat that fast and that has to be a new world record. My skin, bones, muscles, organs—everything I can think of—ache; it's worse than ever, and I still can't catch my breath.

He's not here. He can't hurt you. You're safe.

I repeat these words again and again and again, but they taste like a bitter lie. Yeah, he's not here, not physically at least, but I can constantly hear his voice in the back of my head, saying the cruelest things, so it doesn't really make a difference.