Gruesome. And somehow… beautiful.
The honest heart of a very bad man.
Who scared the absolute shit out of her… because there was something there she very much didn’t want to see. Something sheknewnot to look upon.
Something reaching for her.
Mentally flailing away from his sucking pull, Brenya fought to be free of his riptide, to escape before Jules made her look. But there was no surface to swim to. No up or down. Only endless, consuming hunger in which his thoughts flowed through hers—not violently like Jacques’s invasion, but with precision as they worked between the cracks of her thinking. Until she couldn’t distinguish where she ended and Jules began.
“Jacques was right…” Hot tears rolling down her cheek, Brenya wavered on her feet, black spots in her vision, as she panted, “…youaredeceitful.”
With a fleeting look of pity, Jules held her closer. “I have been gentle with you, Brenya. Even in this, I am being gentle.”
But it was agony the way he settled inside her. Just as painful as Jacques’s phantom knot twisted up her empty, drooling cunt.
Dark delight filled Jules’s expression as he cradled her head against his shoulder when she slumped, tenderly brushing tangled hair from her tear-streaked face. “I gave you freedom while he slept, Brenya. Autonomy to come or go as you wished. I taught you how to build a nest. I healed your body.”
Achingly intimate, tender, he kissed her flushed cheek. Yet nothing was kind about the piercing intensity in those burningeyes as he spoke. “You think you’ve been manipulated, that I would stoop to forcing your submission with mental tricks and theatrical orchestrations because I am what I am.But I don’t need to force anything.I could easily take whatever I want from you in any sick way I might imagine. But have I? No.”
Jules dragged his gaze slowly over her claiming mark. His fingertips followed, the touch possessive and deliberate as he traced each jagged edge of her disfigurement. “I could do to you what he is doing right now, with a simple, uncontained thought. I could touch myself and make you wild with the need to come… and deny you. As I have denied myself in all these months we’ve been bonded. I could make you beg. The Alpha fool will not extend such courtesy, now that he’s awake. And hemustbe awake for you to thrive.”
“No!” Jacques would never be necessary! She hated him.Hated!And the fact that the Beta who took such care of her would allow Alpha influence to touch her short-circuited her crumbling restraint.
Gods… the scent of him was killing her. His touch burning.
Sheneededa knot.Neededto be filled.
Imagined there would be hours more of this pain while there was nothing to be done but bear it. And Jules only made it worse. His cum-drenched scent tickling her tongue, moving through each deep breath. His touch hovered over her skin, exacting, designed. He mapped the nerves he could exploit, brushed the ones that would tingle, but never touched the places she needed relief. Driving her mad with desire.
Like estrous, but worse. A sick parody, where every humiliating convulsion came with full, conscious awareness of how used andinsaneher body had become as his black sea of death slithered over her thoughts.
He wasn’t soothing her—he was making it worse.
She couldn’t take it.
Shoving him away like the violent little thing Jacques often accused her of being—the embodiment of female rage the Alpha had fed with his violations, that he had punished when it dared emerge—she screamed, “I am not a toy! You don’t get to play with me just because you can!”
And Jules? He simply let her rage, releasing his Omega without resistance. Offering Brenya the freedom to act as she wished.
For all that had been done to her, to her people, to the Betas, to her Dome. Her palm cracked across his cheek. Then the other. She beat at his chest as hard as she could. Over and over. Shrieking. Cursing him in language more foul than she had ever dared speak aloud.
And he accepted every blow.
Every last one, until she was a panting, wild mess.
And when Brenya realized what she’d done, and to whom—a man who could literally slaughter everyone inside her Dome—she woke from the spell of rage as if doused with a bucket of ice water.
Disbelief and instant regret left her in a cold sweat. But not fear.
Not of Jules. Not of his retaliation.
Because a man like Jules Havel would never strike her back.
Or murder her kind to punish her transgression.
And those intense blue eyes silently demanded she recognize that vital point.
He could killeveryone. Torment her friends as Jacques had, make her watch him play with them while they suffered.
