Bound to love |BxB|

Chapter 9

"A-Are you insane?"

I blurted out, taking a wary step back when the man balanced his tall frame onto the padded mattress. Atticus snapped his yellow eyes to me with a blazing defiance, laughter shuddering his chest.

"You tell me. Have I gone insane?"

He pulled his sleeves over his forearms, revealing a set of brawny, muscular arms. There was a golden clock on his wrist, though what looked like a knock-off, and countless amounts of rings on his refined fingers.

I could already feel that cold metal on my skin, mangling my muscles into shreds of meat and bursting my veins into blotched dark spots. And I could already see how I would fold in front of him, robbed of the touch of the present. He would turn into them, his words would turn into them, and his touch would turn into them. Like what happened every time I competed with anyone else but my fathers or brother.

He'd destroy me, and if by far he didn't know me, now he would. He'd see me as the frail runt I was– the Royal that was better off as rat food rather than a warrior.

My stomach churned and wrenched, horror dilating my eyes, "I-I'm not f-fighting y-you–"

"Tsk. Too late, I already got excited. And I ain't stopping before you tell me exactly what I want to know."

He balled his fists and pulled them against his chest, only four or five strides away from me. My feet took me frantically even farther, gathering as much space between us as possible, "N-No, you d-don't underst—"

"What? You think I'll beat you? Scared of a wolfless, drunken man, are you, Birdie?" his predatory eyes followed me, like a prowling fiend hidden in slender grass, "You have an extra foot too, don't you?"

So that's what was in that bottle.

The realisation passed me quickly, barely reaching my awareness. There had been something odd about him the whole interaction, but I had been too panicked and absorbed in my thoughts to detect it. That whiff of sunflower and seashore that I had learned to identify as his scent had something else fused into it, something both sweet and bitter. And the way he talked sloppy, moved lazy, and blinked at me all lumpish– he was drunk.

How had it gone past me?

But so it did this time as well because all I could focus on was the growing terror inside me.

"A-Atticus," I pleaded, shaking my head at him.

And he did none other than ignore me, taking a long, confident step forward. As if he would have any kind of shot at winning me– in his own little world. As if he wasn't having trouble walking at all, completely disregarding how he almost knocked himself over with that one, singular step. Drunk, impaired, and clueless– yet with the biggest backbone I had ever seen.

He was insane.

"Oh, please," he lurked closer and closer, only the punching bag in the middle of the ring separating us, "Let's play a game, Peyton. I'll pretend I'm Ronan, and you'll show me what you did. I know his style, patterns, and tactics, and you know how to crush them. All you gotta do is display."

He cooed, earning another frenzied shake of my head as I desperately backed along his approach, "A-Atticus, no–"

I cried out, tears swelling in my eyes. The whole room around me began twirling.

I could hear the voices in my head, the loud cheering of a crowd that had forever been pasted into my head. How they all had laughed at my expense as I had fallen to the ground in the courtyard for the first time. How they had pointed at me like I was a zoo animal, with zero regard to any kind of... humanity.