Total pages in book: 15
Estimated words: 14237 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 71(@200wpm)___ 57(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 14237 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 71(@200wpm)___ 57(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
“Half-brother.” I scowled, rubbing where her sharp little appendage caught me.
“He’s still blood.”
“Yes, and he likes to spill blood,” I hissed.
Her eyebrows raised. “As do you if I’m not mistaken.”
Henri sucked in a breath.
I groaned. “Esclave, you’re really not—”
“Esclave?” Henri scowled. “You call your wife slave? What the fuck?”
Tess grinned. “Think of it as sweetheart or darling. I always knew, even from the very first moment he called me that, that he was madly in love with me.”
“Madly obsessed with you more like,” I muttered. “Dangerously possessed. There’s a difference.”
“Not for us there isn’t.” She winked. “And we all lived happily ever after, even with your fetishes.”
Goddammit, this woman.
Pressing a kiss to my cheek, she waved between me and Henri. “So…what’s the story? You’ve been in here ages and are still glowering daggers at each other. Let’s go get a drink. Have some dinner. Mrs Sucre is getting mighty tetchy that her soufflé is ruined because we didn’t eat it in time.”
“Tess, mon amour.” I gritted my teeth. “Please leave. I’ll escort Henri out and—”
“Dinner would be great,” Henri interrupted, throwing a hesitant smile at Tess. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“Trouble? Oh no, Mrs Sucre always cooks far too much. You can meet Suzette and Franco and—”
“He’s not staying, Tess.” I did my best to hold on to my temper, failing by the second.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not welcome here.”
“So that’s what this is about?” Tess asked, flicking both of us a look. “Henri came looking for family and you’re refusing to give him one? How can you not welcome your own flesh and blood, Q?”
Fucking woman.
She’d always read me too easily.
Always stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong.
Before I could form an answer, Henri murmured, “I don’t know a thing about either of you and you don’t know a thing about me, but…I feel more myself in the twenty minutes I’ve been here than I have in my entire life. I feel like I can breathe. Like I’m…free. Not fully. I doubt I’ll ever know what true freedom feels like, but I do feel as if I can relax a little. Like I won’t fuck everything up by saying the wrong thing or admitting who I truly am.” His grey eyes landed on mine. “If I can have that freedom for a few more hours before I’m evicted from your lives, then—”
“Nonsense.” Tess smiled kindly. “You’re my brother-in-law—”
“He’s nothing to you, Tess. Just like you are nothing to him,” I snapped.
“Jeez, stop being such a monster, maître.”
Everything inside me went still, dark and dangerous. “Careful, esclave.”
She drew herself up but didn’t back down. “He came for you, Q. Don’t you see? He needs you.”
Henri wisely stayed silent.
I tripped into Tess’s beguiling blue-grey eyes.
I could never refuse her anything when she got stroppy like this. Fiery and fierce and tempting my palm to bring her back into line all while she made me fucking beg.
“What do you need from him to prove he’s looking for nothing more than company?” Tess crossed her arms.
At least she’d changed into a faint blue jumper and jeans. She looked young and innocent, belying the temptress beneath. The temptress that’d turned me inside out and back to front all because she could handle the filth inside me.
An idea sparked.
An idea I tried to crush but couldn’t.
She called me a monster?
I didn’t like that label, but it fit.
It had always fit.
I was a monster.
To my enemies and my loved ones.
The curse never lifted.
The needs never faded.
I’d learned to exist despite them.
I was happy in spite of them.
But I remembered all too well the haunting, harrowing existence I’d lived before Tess came along. The agony of wanting what I couldn’t have. The despicable need burning me up. The lust that came with so much disgust and shame.
If Henri fought such battles, I wasn’t surprised he’d dabbled with the idea of ending it.
Wiping my mouth, I shook my head a little.
The idea kept evolving, spreading, unfolding like a map before me.
He could be useful.
He could be my secret weapon to infiltrate the clubs that knew who I truly was: the traffickers I’d dealt with in the past and managed to slaughter, only for new ones to spring up like weeds, fully aware of what I did and always one step ahead of my usual methods to hunt them down.
Lowering my hand, I studied Henri with new eyes.
Would he have the strength?
Would he lose his rotten soul if I threw him into the darkness where we both belonged?
“What are you thinking, Q?” Tess asked quietly. “I know that look and it’s not good.”
Ignoring my meddling little wife, I locked gazes with my half-brother and said the words that would ultimately break him or save him. “You want to belong? You want a ready-made family that sees you and accepts you? Fine.”