“Offer me that fucking elixir again, and I’ll drown you in it!” Nix dared her.
“What’s happening?” Persius asked, distressed. Distressed forElle.
Nix ground her teeth. Elle thought she could enchant Nix’s mate? After everything Nix went through for a second chance?
“Y-You need to calm down,” Elle told her, but it had the opposite effect. “You don’t know what you’re—”
“Stop,” a masculine voice yelled out, and everything went black.
Being carried away for acting “crazy” by Bael, the impulsive and knife-wielding sex demon, was a new low for Nix. He carried her away from Elle’s dorm room—where Elle cried over her broken wrist, and Persius fawned over her.
After hearing Nix’s chaotic yelling of “What did you do to him?” and Elle’s damsel-in-distress voice shouting for her to calm down, Bael had wrapped his arms around Nix’s waist and physically dragged her from Elle’s room just as Nix…fainted. Another new low.
Damsels fainted. Nix was no damsel.
Nix had just broken someone’s wrist in a burst of fury andpassed out.
Humiliating.
Carrying her down the hallway, when Nix awoke in his arms, Bael immediately covered her mouth to muffle her various statements of, “This isn’t right! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Let me fucking kill her!”
“Shhh, no exclamations of preconceived murder in the public hallway,” Bael whispered to her. “It’ll get me too horny, and I’ll be forced to fuck you against the wall while others watch.”
Stunned, Nix sputtered but remained quiet.
When he finally carried Nix out of the dorm building, he dropped her onto the grass and sat down in front of her.
“Want to tell me what that was all about?” Bael asked her, crisscrossing his legs. “You just broke your adoptive sister’s wrist and cryptically screamed about what she ‘did to you.’”
He added, “I thought, between the two of us, you were the more rational, patient, and thinks-things-through person. We can’t both be impulsive and prone to violence, baby. We’d make the world fucking bleed.”
Nix huffed and stood, dusting Ryker’s button-down off for possible grass stains. “You can’t just manhandle me like that,” she snapped at him.
Rising from his spot on the grass, he stood and said, “You like it when I manhandle you.”
A faint pink blush threatened to break out over her cheeks when she thought about how dominant Bael could be in her fantasies.Holding my throat, my wrists, and pinning me to a wall. Bending me over a desk and slapping my ass.
Distracting!
“Not out in public,” she said. “I don’t appreciate being treated like a crazy person.”
Elle was with Persius. Persius did not know Nix was his mate. This timeline was…fucked.I feel like I’m going crazy.
Bael cocked his head to the side and studied her. “You were spouting off nonsense about the future like a crazy person. You broke Council President Oadess’s darling daughter’s wrist—which, by the way,veryhot.”
Rage.
There was an emotional tornado inside Nix, sucking up every bit of panic, dread, fury, and heartbreak, and creating a monstrous wrath. Elle may have slept with Persius last night.She wanted to burn Elle’s bed. She wanted to burn the whole dorm building.
Maybe this second chance at life was actually a thinly veiled curse of misfortune. Was it karma for letting herself get distracted by the new men in her life? Incubus Bael, dragon shifter Ryker, and gargoyle shifter Professor Thierry. Was this bad luck caused by not being loyal to Persius?
“Fuck you.” She jabbed a finger into Bael’s hard chest, and he flinched.
“Are you—” Bael’s expression twisted into one of horror, a rare occurrence for the man raised in literal Hell. “—crying?”
“You have no idea what is going on.” She jabbed her finger into him again, ignoring the sensual sparks that infiltrated her whenever they touched. Her emotions swayed and blazed between hurt and heartache to anger. “No idea what this means. You…You have no clue.”
What had she done to the future? What if, after everything, shestillended up captured and all alone? No Persius to provide her a light in the darkness?
