He reached out, pulling my hand not holding the sheet up to his chest. My fingers traced over a jagged scar that ran over his collarbone as he continued to speak.
“He said if I ever ran again, he would carve a crown into my back to remind me where I belonged. My being the shithead kid that I was didn’t believe him until he did make good on his promise.”
My gaze lingered on the reflection of his back in the mirror to the now obvious scar his tattoo covered. He had turned his trauma into something permanent. A badge. A warning. A vow.
“You tattooed over the scars,” I murmured, pulling my eyes back to where my fingers were still absentmindedly running over the puckered skin.
“I didn’t want to forget.” Kaius’s voice was soft, but the emotion behind his words was palpable. I could almost taste it. “But I wanted to decide how those memories were remembered.”
Something in me broke in that moment. Not just for the child who had been hurt, but for the man who still carried that pain—layered over with ink, power, and violence he wore like armor.
I smiled lightly up at him. “I thought you were invincible.”
Kaius stepped further into me, my back now pressed up against the doorframe. He placed one forearm above me, leaning into me until his lips were just a breath above mine. “I’m anything but invincible.”
The hand that was at his collarbone traveled down his chest, letting my fingers barely ghost his skin as I did. When I got to the edge of a scar near his ribs, his breath hitched slightly, but he didn’t pull away.
I wanted to hate him, to push him back and rebuild the walls I had let fall tonight. But all I could see was the boy who had survived hell and risen from it with nothing but fire in his veins. It reminded me of my brother, of all the boys who had survived this life.
And I didn’t know what scared me more—the fact that suddenly Kaius Mordred made me feel like I was the only person in this world he cared for. Or the part of me that still wanted to destroy him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
acelynn
The next morning,when I woke, Kaius was already gone, which made it easy for me to slip out of the bar before I was caught by anyone in the club. After the conversation last night and what he had shared with me, I don’t think I would be able to face Astoria or Nolan without them assuming something had happened. For some reason, if Kaius had just fucked me, it would have felt less intimate than him baring his trauma to me.
I hoisted myself onto my kitchen counter, the air from the open freezer brushing against my heated skin as flashes of what I would have let Kaius do to me if I hadn’t pulled away last night filled my mind.
The image of Kaius’s teeth scraping across the most intimate parts of me sent a shudder down my spine. I could almost hear the low growl that would come from him when I whimpered his name. The spoon dipped in the ice cream I had just been eatingclattered to the floor, ripping me from my dirty daydream and back to reality.
I was not just a normal girl thinking about the possibility of sleeping with a normal guy. I was tangled up with the president of the Knights of Lovelen. And I was the poison ready to destroy everything in his life.
The sudden ring of my phone sent me leaping off the counter. I stumbled over myself as I made my way over to my bag. Overturning the gray fabric satchel, the contents spilled across the hardwood floor. Coins clanked to the surface, sounding like bombs detonating in the battlefield in my mind. A lone, half-used lip gloss rolled across the kitchen into the living room, disappearing under the couch, never to be seen again.
My chest felt heavy, lungs refusing to fill with the air they needed. But it was no use, not when the overwhelming surge of fear coursed through me as I remembered the sounds of Oscar’s screams. I could taste the metallic tang of blood on my tongue. Tears streamed down my face as I tried to find where my damn phone was.
There was no going back from how I was starting to feel about Kaius. I felt that in the silence when we both lay wrapped up in each other’s embrace late into the night. Felt it in the way Kaius had stroked up and down my spine softly, slowly soothing me to sleep. And the worst one of all—I had felt it in the featherlight kisses he had placed against my forehead when he had calmed my fears that had begun to plague my dreams, nightmares slowly disappearing until I was left with one of the best sleeps I’d had in years.
Shaking the bag once again, an unfamiliar cream envelope tumbled out of it. My trembling fingers traced the edge of the closure, picking lightly at where it was sealed, until I finally tore through the paper.
Inside, there were three different Polaroids. The first showed me standing outside the red barn, glaring up at Parsons. I shuffled to the second, my face twisted in a scream behind Kaius as he hovered over Oscar’s spasming body. Foam spilled from his mouth like a death rattle captured in time. The third had me freezing in place. It was Kaius and me. He was leaning over me in the doorway, eyes watching me intensely as my hand explored his scarred chest.
Blood rushed to my ears, blocking out the outside world. There was an unspoken passion that surrounded us, the moment so incredibly intimate, leaving me feeling exposed. From the angle of the photo, the image would have had to have been taken from inside the small closet to our left, which meant someone had to have been in the room the entire time or planted a camera. I was going to be sick.
Ripping my eyes away from the photo of us, I dragged them down to the red words that were scrawled out on the white strips of two of the Polaroids. The third was only marked with a single red spade. My brows scrunched together before I slammed down the images to arrange them on the floor in front of me, taking in the full sentence.
MiNE tO haVe.
My mind whirled as I tried to unscramble the capitalized letters just as Kaius had shown me on the night of the rattlesnake. A scream ripped through me when the letters clicked together, and I slammed the bag to the ground, silencing the ringing in my ears.
Venom.
A direct taunt from the poisonous snake that Logan had left on my bed the last time he made his presence known.
Prey. Venom. Prey. Venom.
The words tangled in my throat as I whispered them, trying to make sense of the sick game he was playing. Logan was watching me closely. He had been in Kaius’s room recently. My throat constricted at the idea of Logan being that close to me, and I began to gag, but nothing came up. I couldn’t stay in this town, not when I was betraying the Knights, and Logan was the wild card that was being unwillingly played. I was either going to be killed by the hands of the man I once loved or the man who was beginning to become my favorite addiction.
