The tension is thicker now. Stifling. Smothering. For fuck’s sake, she makes it hard to breathe. My hands flex with the desire to play with the royal violet brown curls rippling down her cheeks and beyond my cap, her crown—the ones the braid could never hold.
I don’t see her hand until she swings it. Not until it strikes my cheek. I don’t flinch. Unmoving. I let her have it.
“Did she just—” Seth asks in shock.
“Shhh,” Jude hushes everyone, silencing them for me. The corners of his mouth tug upward.
But not her.
Briella bares her teeth but seethes through her nostrils. Beautiful, little monster. When she clenches her hand into a fist and rears it back, I don’t blink. Again, I give her a strike to my jaw, my mouth. I taste the metallic bite of blood, a phantom pain.
This time, I catch her wrist, narrow my eyes, and command, “Stop.”
Her lips part. She freezes from our last memory together. But her body trembles. Good. So does my soul.
Her fingers loosen and curl in my grip, but her eyes are accusatory. As is her tongue. “Where in all fucking hell were you?!”
“Hunting.”
Something in her snaps.
Claws scraping, teeth biting, with the bloodthirsty madness in her eyes, she attacks with all her vengeance.
It takes all of a second for me to catch her, to cage those violent hands at the center of her spine, bending her back onto the table.
My brothers stand, bearing witness, not interfering. They want to. But they know: if they tried, I’d shed their blood, break their bones.
Briella bucks and thrashes.
“You motherfuckingsoneofabastardchickenshit! You coward! How dare you? You goddamnheartlessspineless—ahhh!”
Cries and snarls and screams, and all manner of unholy, feminine sounds leave her throat as she lunges for me, snapping her teeth, sinking them with merciless power into my neck. Like a little beast making her claim.
Pain burns like a venom.
“Fuck!” I growl, knowing blood is dripping—because it coats her lips.
I remove one hand from her back. The feeling of her writhing and squirming gets me hard as I grab her throat and hold her against the table. Steady head tilted. Predatory eyes pinned to her, watching, waiting as she exhausts herself.
I let her. I don’t interfere.
I give her the screaming, spitting, cursing my name with the ice in her bone marrow and the fire in her blood.
I give her what she wants, what she needs. To be heard. To be seen. To know she is safe to beunsafe with us, with me.
Ruled by a violent possession and not by fear, my Queen is knocking every damn piece off the board to get to me.
And still, her crown does not fall.
Then, finally…she breaks. In those eyes, she finds the strength to kneel. Gasping, panting, crying vulnerable tears. Fuck, this is what I need.
I drink it all in: the shuddering sobs, the way her weakness shines brighter than any strength. She is most beautiful when broken, when bare, when bleeding the truth of her heart. I feast on it like a starving god.
From her stumbling, broken and bruised and bleeding into the cave where I waited, to the night I scarred her with my arrow, my poison running through her veins…
And now, she is just as exquisite. It surges heat in my chest and blood to my length to know she’s tried to piece herself back together without me. But she couldn’t.
“I thought-I thought you—” she whimpers between ragged gasps, “—were dead or injured or you’d just…left. Left me. Forgot about me. Because of…” she trails off, and I don’t need to read her soul, mind, or face to know.Because of me.
