Page 4 of Bad Blood Wolf

Jasmin went totally still.

Brody started over there to punch Bastian’s lights out, but stopped at the look on Jasmin’s face.

Bastian’s hand froze in mid-air.

Moving as slowly as a stalking cat, Jasmin peeled off her own shirt. She was wearing nothing underneath, and her breasts were—well, only an idiot like Bastian would think they weren’t amazing. Smooth, sexy, kissable rounds, moving with her sleekly muscled chest.

Bastian had clearly changed his mind about the inferiority of the boobs, because his jaw went slack. Brody would have called him a freakin’ perv except that he was staring just as hard, and his boner had started up again.

Jasmin reached out to Bastian, still moving in hypnotic slow motion. With a flick of her fingers she manifested her claws, and then slowly raked one down Bastian’s chest, right through the busty mermaid, splitting the skin and cutting her boobs off.

Bastian’s eyes widened in shock, and blood ran down his chest.

Jasmin looked from her own chest to Bastian’s. “There,” she purred. “Now she doesn’t have a rack either.”

She turned and walked off toward the bag area, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder, showing them her back to underscore that she didn’t have any fear of them at all.

Damn, Brody thought. He might have just fallen in love with the crazy.

Jasmin took her pants off and tucked her clothes into her bag, then let one of the fight security crew escort her to the cage. Deep inside, she could hear her grandmother’s voice.

How dare you do that to a man? He’ll come after you! He’ll hurt you! Say you’re sorry!

She shoved her layers of steel over the whining weakling they’d tried to raise her to be. She told herself she was grateful to the buzz-cut now-boobless-mermaid guy, whoever the fuck he was. Dealing with him had forced her to slow down and focus.

And it had fueled her jaguar’s rage. Arrogant prick, trying to intimidate her. But she’d given him nothing. No fear.

Only pain and humiliation.

She stood in front of the gate, waiting for the announcer, blocking out everything—the noise, the crowd, the fact that she was totally naked in a barn full of hyped-up dominant male wolves.

She couldn’t let any of that affect her. When she was a prisoner in Alexander Fucking Grant’s shifter-experimentation lab, the guards had paraded all the women around with no clothes, shocking them with stun weapons and spraying them with fire hoses to force them into obedience.

Touching them whenever they wanted.

She was impervious to all of it.

She had to be, or they would have broken her. She’d seen other shifters break, but not her—never her.

Women are soft. She’d heard that all her life. Women were soft, and soft meant weak, and weak meant you were at the mercy of everyone stronger than you.

Like the female jaguars were at the mercy of the males.

Her mother had suffered from being too soft, and Jasmin knew the only way she would get out was to grow up hard. Her mother’s legacy had been greater than she ever knew, because without that steel inside her, Jasmin would never have survived Grant’s cells.

Jonesing for a brawl now and then was a small price to pay for the kind of strength that meant no matter how deep and dark your prison, a part of you would always be free.

If only she didn’t have to keep proving it.

As the gate opened, she let her jaguar have her skin—tawny fur with clusters of black spots. She didn’t bother to wait for the announcer.

Rules were for pack animals. She was one jaguar, alone.

At the other side of the cage she saw a huge wolf, black as midnight, with just one white paw.

There was crazy in this one’s eyes, too.

Good. She liked the crazy. And no one here had as much crazy as a Bad Blood.

The announcer got on the PA.

“And now for the moment you’ve been waiting for,” he said. “Our star attraction, the Demon Queen of the Amazon, versus the Rabid-Fire Wolf.”

Stupid name,Jasmin thought. But the audience cheered wildly.

Cheer while you can. This isn’t going to last long.

Jasmin let out a snarl, showing her fangs, knowing her eyes were glittering green-gold. In her nostrils was the smell of blood and canine fur, the stink of wolves.

But deeper than that, far down in her brain, was the smell of the turgid jungle air, humid and lush and filled with decay.

She’d always been told the jungle law was eat or be eaten, kill or be killed.

Now she knew better. You could kill all you wanted, but until your enemy submitted, you hadn’t really won.

With a feral snarl, she aimed for the wolf’s huge neck, and attacked.