24. Daphne The Monster And The Wolfe
twenty-four
Daphne: The Monster And The Wolfe
“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” I swatted, straddling the bladed weapon, gunning down Main Street at eighty miles an hour. Thay only laughed, throwing his head back while he swerved around one of the three cars on the straightaway.
“I’d keep low,” he choked out, forcing me to his neck, “unless you want to die.”
Holding my breath, I scrambled for the passenger seat, but he swerved, knocking me flat against him.
“Knock it the shit off,” he ground out when the car corrected back into its lane. “You better stay on my dick like the good, compliant, listening thing you are or I won’t fuck you.”
I panted, a storm of fear and chaos blooming inside my chest.
Did Thay just say he was going to… my brain melted, disbelief thundering through every visible thought.
No. He was being an asshole. There was no way this man would ever touch me that way.
“Put your arms around my neck,” Thay bit out, and I scrunched my nose. “Goddammit, Daphne,” he banked left, hurling me against the driver’s door, and I screeched, clinging to him on instinct.
Asshole.
“Good girl,” he praised, pushing harder on the gas.
“How the hell do you even know where you’re going?” I grimaced, watching the darkness in Wolfe’s expression stretch when he caught me staring at him from the slits in the headrest. It was strange, the way he casually flung his leg over his knee in complete silence.
“We Airtagged your ass before you left Seattle. I always know where you are,” Thay bit back, taking another swing at the fact that I was the antihero in this tale.
“Are you just going to sit there?” I swatted Wolfe’s boot to the floor, but all I got was a grin straight from the devil. I paused, recalling a conversation Nathem had with a recruit who had questions about our triangle.
“Which one is she with?” the boy inquired, drowning in a leather jacket that was three sizes too large.
“Why, do you like her?” Nathem asked, rubbing his tongue over his teeth.
“She’s damn cute.”
“Not to you, she isn’t. And if you say that to either of them, you’re fucking dead,” Nathem explained, pressing a cigarette to his lips. “I am not kidding, mate. Daphne is off-limits.”
“Shit,” the recruit exhaled. “I don’t understand.”
“Look at this way. If Threx doesn’t have Daphne, Wolfe doesn’t have Threx.”
“Okay, but who does she fuck?”
“Wolfe. And because of that, he has them both.”
I did not doubt Wolfe loved me, but he was always playing ten games at once. In his head. In his heart. In his body. There was simply no way of knowing which piece would win, but I had a pretty good record of being the caveat to every rule.
“Fine!” I huffed, which only made him more feral. “You can go fuck yourself, too, then,” I glared. “Or better yet... Why don’t you both fuck each other and leave me the hell alone?”
Wolfe licked his lips. “I told you she’d be into it.”
Thay’s voice went dark against my cheek as he took a hard turn onto the shelled driveway that led to my cabin at the edge of the sea. I nearly stopped breathing when he hit the brakes, my hands grasping his arm to keep myself from being thrown against the dashboard.
“Is that what you want, Daphne? For me to go?” Thay called my bluff, daring me to say the words that sat so prettily on the tip of my tongue… Which, of course, I did not, because I would never.
“You are insane,” I pushed off of him, worming to scramble out of the door, but he held me by the hips.
“I thought you liked that about me,” he arched a brow, gliding his rough hands up the slope of my neck until they were around my throat. “Don’t you, Daph? You prefer it when I don’t play by the rules… especially when it comes to you.”
My brain trembled, the swell of his voice hitting the pressure along my windpipe, threatening to burn me alive.
“Now tell me the truth,” his thumb ran north before finding my chin. “Say that you left me.”
A drunken feeling sank into my bones when a string of violent words reached my lips. “After you say, you’re mine!” I countered, breaking every rule.
Thay’s lips twitched in defiance. “No,” he said, simple and bladed. “Not until you stop being a fucking liar.”
“Let me go,” I squirmed, throwing my weight in every direction. I forgot this man takes down literal monsters twice my size every day.
“Are you kidding me right now?” I pounded along his spine when he flung me over his shoulder and kicked in the cabin front door. “Hey,” I growled. “I work here! You can’t just go around breaking shit.”
“Aw, Daph,” Thay mocked, flinging me onto the middle of the kitchen table. “You forget,” his fingers slid up the back of my thighs to scoot me to the edge, when his chest skimmed over the heave of my breast. “I do whatever the hell I want.”
Thay’s hands curled up and over the waistband of my leggings when Wolfe stepped into the darkness, closing the busted door with a labored shove.
What, was he just going to watch?
“No!” I growled, swatting Thay’s touch away in one fell swoop.
Thay’s eyes flashed wide before falling into a low, bellied laugh.
“No?” he questioned, cocking his head to the side, and it was hard not to notice the way the shadows clung to his form, shifting and moving with each flex. It made it difficult to breathe. To think. “As in you don’t want me to touch you?”
The words called my bluff, making every muscle in my body tense.
“Maybe you would rather Wolfe touch you instead?” He withdrew, placing both hands in the air in mock surrender, correcting his posture as he peered down at me. “Why don’t you ask him, Daphne?” Thay blinked. “Ask him to touch you.”
The table’s craggy ridges dug into my spine when I shifted to my elbows in a silent scowl.
“You, after all, love the motherfucker,” he lowered his head over my mouth. “How about you show me how much?”
Wolfe did not motion to save me; he only crossed his arms, shifting his weight against the doorframe like the ghost he’d always been. I exhaled, feeling everything swirl.
“Asshole!” I shoved against Thay’s stomach, the flat of my hands meeting the burn of his flesh.
When Thay fell back, he did not prevent me from jetting off toward the bathroom, nor did he say one word when I turned to slam it shut.
I didn’t think twice before I climbed inside the empty bathtub. I needed a second to breathe. To process. To…
“Nope!” Thay barreled through the door, slamming the knob into the drywall. My eyes flashed from my knees when he crawled into the cramped space to yank me upright.
“I think you might have finally lost your goddamn mind,” I growled, falling back against the bathroom tile.
“Yes,” he agreed, stepping into me. “But you know that happens when your fucking heart gets ripped from your chest, Daphne!” He braced against the flat of my stomach, where my breath moved like clouds.
“You’re not dead, Thay,” I reminded. “Just a prick.”
He tugged my wrist up over his ribcage and leaned into it, guaranteeing I felt all of him and the way he broke. At once, the sick pulse screamed into my blood, twisting into me like a dying star.
Oh, no. Fuck. He was in pain.
“You were saying?” he asked in the quiet, blinking slowly, allowing everything to stretch.
Knowing this fight was far from over, I pressed deep into the tissue and massaged, moving the blood into his veins, until it circulated, pulsed, beat…
Thay closed his eyes in a pained, violent shudder.
This is what he needed. What he had been waiting for. Me.
“I left you,” I finally said, pushing past the muscle in a slow, unhurried confession. “I did not want to. But I did.”
“Why?” he bit out, slowly opening his eyes to see my face.
“Because Wolfe made Lyla his queen and then you put me on a plane,” my head slumped forward. “You might want me, Thay, but you didn’t keep me. And neither did Wolfe.”
“Because keeping you would kill you, Daphne.”
A crooked smile sank into the corner of my lips, and my eyes fell even lower. “Life support is worse,” I admitted. “And this half-life is tearing me open.” A jagged breath hit my lungs, but he did not move to cure it. He only watched. “We share a body. A heart. One soul, asshole. One.”
Thay’s jaw ticked.
“So, you can hate me for leaving you, but I hate you for ever forcing me to feel that this is exactly where you wanted me. For making me believe that all I am is the culmination of all your fuckedupness.”
Thay’s hands were all skin and muscle as he lifted me into his arms.
“I am yours, Daphne,” he shouted into me, holding me tighter. “Only yours.”
I expected him to fight, to fall into his usual bulleted list explaining every reason he never put lips on mine, but instead, he stalked back into the kitchen and placed me at the edge of the table.
Wolfe breathed, his mouth twisting around a cigarette when his attention fell on me in a thoughtful glance.
“We hurt our girl.” Thay dropped to his knees in front of me, and I bit my lip, watching the storm in his eyes swell.
“Did we?” Wolfe took a drag, perfuming my kitchen with menthol and tobacco. “And how did we do that?”
“We love her, but we refused to keep her,” Thay said low, untying my shoes and tossing them under the table. “I think we broke her heart.”
“Mmmh,” Wolfe licked his lips, passing the cigarette to Thay. “That is pretty fucked up of us.”
“Well,” Thay took a long drag. “We are pretty fucked up!”
Wolfe smirked, bruising my throat with his eyes.
“True,” he nodded. “But I believe we were trying to save her life. I mean, since she likes the sun so much and all.”
“She does seem to prefer it,” Thay agreed, his fingertips edging up the side of my leggings to the waistband, half a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “But honestly, monsters can only do so much of the right thing until eventually it becomes wrong.”
“Mmmh,” Wolfe stepped forward to pull the nicotine from Thay’s lips before dragging the burn down his forearm to burn it out. “But that is the thing about Daphne,” he placed a hand on Thay’s shoulder. “She gets off on wrong.”