Jules recognized that look. Had studied it in hours of footage. Invited it in. Peeled back his authority deliberately, inviting the last lash of the whip. Her final suffering.
He let Jacques in.
The Alpha’s ghost hovered between them, allowed to insert itself. Gods only knew what her auditory hallucinations were saying in that cute, twitching limbic brain. Horrors, he hoped. Jacques at his worst. Threatening her, belittling her. Begging.
That voice—he would desensitize her to it. Strip it of power. Reshape it into static noise she must learn to live with.
Her discomfort was the goal. The necessary remedy to her cowardice.
Whatever her knot-starved imagination conjured in those seconds was bleak enough to make her shriek and throw herself around him. Thin arms wrapping his neck with startling strength. Fingers burrowed into his hair, Brenya gripping hard enough his roots stung, her body shaking as she pulled her to him in blind panic.
“I’m here. Look at me, Brenya. Stay with me.” Kisses on her cheeks, light, playful, the exact opposite of whatever was taking place in her unreliable thoughts. “I am yourrealmate. Your husband, who would never hurt you. Whatever you think you hear… whatever you remember…” Drawing her fingers to the buttons of his shirt, he tethered her to action. Giving her a job to focus on. A choice. His expression carefully arranged. Soft at the edges. A sculpted mask of calm hiding the ravenous beast. The false face of a complicated man who only emoted when it served a purpose. Every look saidstay. Saidfeel me. Saiddo not run. And while she struggled to breathe, to think, he discarded his shirt like it meant nothing and stared at her like she meant everything. “Each second you give me is a second he loses. Touch me, and he fades like a bad dream.”
Agitated, overwhelmed, slick gushing over his cock, his wife—his mate—shifted against him with aching desperation to be free of her demon. Her pretty cunt twitching with unmet need as she whined low in her throat, the sound caged behind trembling lips pressed tight to keep from begging. That muffled noise…that futile effort to contain herself… did things to Jules he was almost incapable of hiding from the overwrought woman.Almost.
Scars. Da’rin. A killer’s body unapologetically on display.
Catching up her hand in his, he dragged her fingertips over the patterns that had captivated her for weeks, tracing swirls, the line of lithe muscle, as he kneeled between her legs. A living history he shared. “These marks that have fascinated you, haven’t they? They’re called Da’rin, a microscopic parasite forced on convicts so they can survive underground without sun for years on end. The symbols…the artistry… isn’t formed naturally.”
Guiding her fingers across his ribs, skin drawn tight over muscle, Jules let his other hand drift lower. His thumb found her clit in a light, maddening stroke as he added, “Those of us who survive long enough learn how to coax them into shape. Personalize the experience.” He took a slow breath. So did she. “Each mark displays…my accomplishments.”
A dark, amused smirk, and then he pulled her nail over his nipple.
Jules’s sharp intake of breath startled her. She glanced up to find his blue eyes darker, pupils dilating with want.
“Again,” he commanded softly.
She obeyed. His nipple hardening under her touch as she traced her finger over it. Slower. Circling with the sharp tip of her nail.
Next, he drew her fingers to his ribs, guiding her touch over the coiling shapes beneath his skin. The Da’rin alive just under the surface curled along the ridges of his obliques and over the hard cut of his abdomen. “These mark the years I spent in the Undercroft,” he said, voice steady, watching her follow one of the spirals with the pad of her finger. “Do you know what that means? Has anyone told you what the Undercroft is?”
“I was told you’d been imprisoned,” she whispered automatically, breath hitching, thighs shaking with residual ache, but her attention was elsewhere. Even Jacques’s screaming muffled by her focus. Blown eyes tracking the marks with uncanny precision, the rest of her body stiff under his touch as her mind pulled taut, narrowing to the work of searching for rhythm, for structure, for meaning in those marks.
They were perfect.
Jules had made them so.
He let her fixate. Encouraged the part of her mind designed for calculation to take over. And when he finally spoke, his voice curled low, deliberate. An invocation. “No. Not prison.Hell.Imagine a labyrinthine oubliette under a thriving Dome, where those thrown in there to die are denied light, food, fresh water. Where you will find endless tunnels, darkness, human waste, rotting flesh. A self-contained society of the discarded—innocents and evil alike—going mad as monsters eat them alive. Rape, violence you cannot imagine, broken minds, suffering. There are still men down there even Shepherd did not want to set free in Thólos.” He laughed bitterly under his breath, not at the cruelty, but the strategy. And for one unguarded second, grief changed his stolid expression. Caught quickly and tucked away. “What do you see in the patterns, Brenya? It’s all right there. How many years was I incarcerated?”
Her eyes ran over that twisting, beautiful nightmare, unlocking the meaning in the flowing geometry as she breathed, “Fourteen?”
“Fourteen years.” He nodded, voice low. “An innocent man—a celebrated surgeon—who had no way of knowing what became of his wife and children. Whosufferedhope. Who survived in the dark for them… only to learn there was no ‘them’ to return to. My sons had been executed, two little boys. Rebecca had been claimed by a man more cunning than Jacques will everbe. Senator Kantor.” He guided her fingers along another coil of Da’rin, letting her trace the shape of it on his skin. “A celebrated public figure. Viewed as a hero in Thólos. Ruthless. Disgusting. He had our children shot right in front of her as he raped her. That was how he forged their bond. Preparing a ‘clean slate,’ assuring nothing of her past life might distract her from the one he would have her live.”
Jules let the words hang for just long enough to sting, but not long enough to fester. Then, softer, “I don’t mention this for pity, Brenya. I say it because you, too, had your choices violently taken from you. You lost your purpose. He hurt your friends.” Jules drew her fingers lower, curling them over the muscle just above his hip. “Don’t you see? We understand each other in ways those who have never known hell ever could. And like me, you are going to find your way out. You are going to protect the Dome, your family, and your people.”
With deliberate slowness, he undid the button of his trousers, pulling down the zipper, the metallic rasp echoing through the room. Fabric parted, and a thick line of ridged flesh, flushed and wet, pushed forward, straining against the restraint of his clothing. Until his crown breached the half-open fly of his trousers, flushed red and drooling viscous globs of opaque white.
Jaw ticking, eyes flashing like a man riding the edge of his breaking point, he drew her hand around his girth and made her feel throbbing flesh, her palm wrapping a half-hidden shaft, ridged and veined, the shape obscene. “Here, I’ll tell the story of the woman I love. I’ll put your name on my cock, Brenya. Because it’s yours.”
His meat jumped in her palm, and a sound caught in her throat, a squeak of shock.
This was no Beta cock. At least, not like any she’d ever seen. Swollen rings pulsed along his thick shaft, each one a perfectridge, obscene and deliberate. Flexing in her grip, those strange protrusions swelled in a ripple.
And he groaned like he might fall apart when her fingers fluttered.
Brenya yanked her hand away from the unnatural thing.
“Shh, angel… you don’t need to be scared.” Hushing her softly, Jules’s voice a low, soothing rumble in her ear, he took her hand gently in his and brought it right back to his prick. “I know I’m big, that I’m different, but I promise, I won’t hurt you.”
