Placing both hands on his taut abdomen, I tried to shove him out of my way.
His chuckle vibrated against my hands. Muscles rippling under my palms. “I think,” he hummed, watching me down the length of his nose, “we should play a game, you and I.”
“I’ve had quite enough of your games, I think.” Dropping low, I lunged for the gap between his hip and the door frame.
An unyielding grip caught me about the middle, and he spun with me. Hauling me back against a wall of muscle, he enveloped me in his scent. Squeezing too tight and not hard enough. “Don’t be so hasty,” he murmured against my ear, as one hand ghosted up from my navel. Catching at the billowing yards of fabric twined about my torso, he paused to cup a handful of fat and flesh—to roll first one, and then the other nipple between his forefinger and thumb—until he caught my throat in his palm. Forcing my head back,backagainst his shoulder. “I’ll even give you favorable terms.”
It was a trap.
I knew it, even without tasting the devious mood he was in.
But I couldn’t help the question from slipping out. “What do you mean?”
A smile twitched where it was pressed into my hair. “All you have to do,” he whispered, “is keep me out. Stop me from learning your secret—”
“I don’t have a secret.”
He laughed, but didn’t bother to argue what we both knew was a lie. “Keep me out,” he said again, “and you can take what you want, little empath. Feast to your heart’s content. I won’t stop you.”
For a moment, we were held in tableau. Both of us staring at his bed without acknowledging the sinister promise lurking in dark, rumpled sheets. What had been my nest for eight days, now loomed with the threat of what else might be done there.
The promise.
Bent over the mattress… clutching at blankets that couldn’t offer so much as a scrap of protection against the man who wanted me spread at his every whim. A man who’d made me gape for him. Who’d touched and filled and coveted every secret corner I’d never wanted to share.
And I knew.
This was a game I would lose, for he was already inside.
I couldn’t stand against a hurricane without Sasha’s wall. I was helpless against the sort of power he wielded with painful ease, the exacting nature of his deadly control. If he really wanted to, he’d simply crack me open and spill my hidden truths himself.
But then… a tiny smirk crinkled the edge of my lips. Unseen, but not escaping notice—not from him.
He saw everything,felteverything.
And so, everything he would have.
My smile grew devious, despite the way my heart thrashed at the back of my throat, for it was there, in my inherent weakness that I had a tiny measure of strength.
I had nothing left. Nothing but my secrets.
One that had been entrusted to me on a dying breath.
One I shared with a traitor that was merely the opening bid in yet another game.
And one that I knew but hadn’t been told.
Asher’s.
The beast I could not name. One I’d only caught a few desperate, fleeting glimpses of when I hadn’t meant to look. Dressed in chains far older than the ones he’d looped around the empath, he’d imprisoned it in the deepest part of his black soul.
Asher wanted me to play. To fight and resist, because he lived for the hunt… the chase. To conquer that which refused to submit, even when the advantage was his. Even when he could command my body with a stray thought,he didn’t.Time and again, he set my wrists and throat ablaze with thethreatof forcing obedience, but only rarely did he follow through.
Only to show me that hecould.
Only if I refused to play.
Because he loved the fight, my leviathan.
