And I won’t be fucking changing the appearance of it for my father.
I lift the crown and maneuver it over my ugly flowery horns. The gold metal, the smooth gemstones, the sparkling flowers, it’s ... a fucking atrocious mess atop my long silver hair.
“I’m ready,” I say with a small lift of my chin.
“Yeah, you know he’s never letting you out of this room with your horns, Ari,” Krave says.
“Yeah, and I don’t give a fuck.” I stride from my velvet seat and meet him head on.
He doesn’t cower before me. His lithe frame towers over me even with my horns, and my stomach dips from the way he gazes at me. The longing in his dark eyes is hard to look at. It’s even harder to keep an impassive, fuck-you glare in place, but I wear it well.
“Move,” I growl with as much hatred as I can find within myself.
It’s misplaced. I know it is. My anger with him is this constant thing that my father puts between us. If my father didn’t own Krave, I’d love him completely.
But instead, I despise him every time he looks at me. Because with every glance, he relays what he sees right to the one person I can never trust.
The long fingers of his right hand, the one with the tattooed crown, twitch like he might touch me. Energy presses between us and siphons into my chest. I swallow hard.
And keep glaring.
For a long moment, I watch him debate with himself. Smoke swirls from his palms like a nervous tick that he’ll never admit to. I can’t tell if he’s about to give in to me. I think he is.
I think he might.
“I can’t,” he whispers.
Fuck!
Fucking Krave and his fucking ties to my father’s binding magic.
My jaw grinds, and I have to calm myself little by little before I speak again in the lowest voice I possess.
“Krave, get out of my way, or so help me, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” he whispers, his head tilting down so far that his words brush across my lips in a slow taunt of sensual dominance.
Something inside me reacts to something inside of him, and the moment that tingling feeling hits low in my core, I shove it away.
As well as him.
I grip his arm and twist it behind his back in one swift move, but like a dance, he twirls out of the forceful position, and we stand with our hands held, arms outstretched to one another, like long lost lovers preparing for the tango.
He smiles.
The fucking cock mongrel.
My nails sink into his tattooed skin, and I leap at him with all my might. Wind flicks through my hair. He catches me as we go down hard. His back hits the glossy wooden floor with a solid thud that knocks the breath from his lungs.
And still he smiles at me.
My legs are straddled on either side of his hips. His hands lift, almost skimming my thighs, but he holds them there around me as he clearly thinks through every move he makes. Before lowering his palms to the ground.
“Was there something you wanted, love?” he asks with so much insinuation dripping from his smooth-spoken words.
“Why—” My molars grind as I try to sort through the thoughts slamming through my mind.Why is he like this? Why did he ever make a deal with my father? Why can’t life be simpler?“Why is your cock hard all of a sudden?”
“What do you meanall of a sudden?” His inky eyebrows lift with too much amusement.
