Somewhere above, beyond the crushing weight of his psyche, Jacques howled. But it barely reached her ears.
Her heart began to race. Her vision collapsed to a single, burning point.
“Gods—” The word caught in her throat when he reached between them and peeled back the hood from her clit, baring the bundle of nerves fully, to grind her against him again.
Gods, don’t!That was what she wanted to scream, but the word “Yes!” rang from her lips instead. Loud, broken, undeniable. Because the fabric of his pants scraped her enflamed clitoris… the sensation brighter than the endless cramp in her guts.
He began to open her shirt, working the buttons one by one with the practiced ease of a man who knew exactly what she needed.
Sweat-damp fabric parted, Jules peeling it back to expose the flushed swells of her breasts. Closing his hand around her flesh, he kneaded her breast with perfect, tantalizing pressure. Thumbing her nipple. Not too rough, not too gentle. Until she arched into his palm and was rewarded with a tweak of her sensitive peak.
The seduction of a virgin.
Who’d had sex but didn’t know what it meant.
Long denied her birthright of pleasure.
He’d get her so drunk on him she’d crawl back again and again, without understanding why… until it was far too late for her to ever regret.
Even now, her breath came in shallow whines… no rhythm, just noise. Music blending with the slick squelch each time he shifted her hips. Her stomach gurgling faintly, womb starved from weeks of neglect.
“That’s it.” Jules knew affection must be cultivated by precision. Brick by brick, experience by experience, so mistakes of the past could not be repeated. “Stay with me. I’m the one you need. The one you’ll love.”
And it was love Jules would have of Brenya Havel.
Not a romanticized fascination with a misunderstood terrorist who was going to fuck her brains out, butactual lovewith the very real monster he was.
Rebecca had been fond of him in her way. But ultimately, she’d wondered what life might be like in an Alpha-Omega “natural state,” doubted, and slipped. One flirtatious pass at Senator Kantor had led to her ruin. To the murder of their sons. And perhaps was the catalyst that ultimately brought down Thólos Dome. If Jules had never been thrown into the Undercroft, he would never have found Shepherd. If Shepherd had never found Jules…
Thólos Dome would still stand.
Shepherd may have been the figurehead Followers worshiped, but many of the deeper cruelties Thólos had suffered? Those had been painstakingly crafted in Jules’s imagination and enacted byhisorder.
When it came to calculation, very few matched his genius. Only Shepherd matched his ruthlessness.
And Jules hadruthlesslywatched Jacques fuck Brenya for hours while he’d been trapped in a prison cell. Catalogued her responses to Jacques’s aggression with surgical interest. After taking Bernard Dome for himself, he’d gone through months’ worth of video surveillance recorded by an Alpha who compulsively filmed every interaction with his damaged mate.
The Alpha’s narcissism was a pure gift.
When Jacques had raped her, Jules noted the seconds it took Brenya to stop crying, the minutes for a modicum of recovery. The breath patterns when she dissociated. The exact pitch of her moan when her body climaxed without consent.
Data. A map of where to touch, how to speak, when to withdraw.
He would use that information—every twitch, every tear, every whispered plea she’d made to the wrong man. Nothing would be wasted in transforming pain into passion. Give her pleasure so exact, so overwhelming, her body would unlearn agony… until it craved what it once feared.
If she had only known that what he had been watching on his COMscreen when she stole her glances of him across the room….
“The moment I saw you—” He dared brush his lips over hers, sweeping his velvet tongue into her mouth as if to tempt her to play. “—you have a phrase for it in French.Le coup de foudre.A lightning strike.” His voice softened, purr calibrated for maximum effect. “And when I caught you pulling my ship apart, repairing it for simple fun… it was the only time in my life that I wished I’d been a different man.”
That first true kiss, Jules pressed it upon her mouth with a tenderness Jacques had never shown her. Gentle, lingering, his strength enveloping a female braced as if he might hurt her. One who went astonishingly liquid the moment he began to really tease her tongue with his.
Her hand, once clutching desperately, nails embedded in his skin, pulled from where little moon-shaped cuts decorated the back of his neck to slide down his chest, feeling his heartbeat.
Unknowingly resting right where their bond had forever carved itself into him.
“Mmm,” she groaned against his mouth, surprised by the satin pleasure softening the muscles twisting her spine. The relief was exquisite. Like breaking the surface after nearly drowning.
She could breathe again.
