Chapter 1 #2
Those unflinching blue eyes sparked with life, strange in their intensity, as the Beta made damn sure she recognized his control, and her lack. His solid, real form. Right there. Not a phantom poking within her guts or playing tricks on her mind.
With measured slowness, he stroked a thumb along her jawline, his intentional, inviting, tempered pitch perfection, as he purred, “Eyes on me, Brenya. Feel me.”
She did.
She felt the uncomfortable squeeze of his fingers around her throat as Jules guided her with that unyielding grip to rise.
To find her footing and unfold… or choke.
To recognize that his strength was necessary.
That without him, to deny him, to try to struggle in the mire of her inharmonious bonds alone was a losing war.
Bare feet scrabbled against the slippery lacquered floor, rivulets of slick trailing down her thighs, as Brenya’s unsteady legs bore her weight.
It was no easy feat. Stiff muscles protested, pain lancing through her womb, but Jules gave her just enough support to keep her upright, at long last coiling his dark sea around a flailing mind that mentally reached for him.
Because she’d asked.
Indulging in the helpless sound of her whimpers, Jules’s chest vibrated with quiet satisfaction. “You’re safe with me.”
Her breath stuttered. Safe? No. There was nothing safe about what Jules had done, was doing, and would do to her.
Safe was existing as a Beta making the descent.
Risking her life day in and day out for the Dome she loved.
Safe was everything that happened before Jacques Bernard ripped her in half on his cock.
Safe was the endless black ocean in Jules when it was glassy and calm.
When her island floated through it untouched, drifting in his unfeeling void.
Not when it crept up her shores… not when it seemed to hunt her.
Safe was dissociation. Safe was Jacques in an endless coma, so she could stumble sleepily through whatever days she had left.
Being here. Feeling him. Standing barefoot in a puddle of her own slick while Jules’s turbulent mental ocean pressed in, licking at their link. Expectant.
Was not safe.
Pupils dilating fully, her world narrowed to Jules Havel, and she offered a pain-drunk, “I don’t feel safe.”
The nothingness inside him reached out again, brushing ever so softly against her fear, seeping in as if wrapping her in a warm blanket. Enveloping his mate in something soothing yet elusive.
His chest expanded, and so did hers.
Synchronized breath, Jules exercising some kind of authority over her body that far outstripped anything Jacques had ever wielded… calming her, drawing Brenya further from the Alpha’s manic grip.
Into Beta control.
Jules… formidable, unreadable, demonstrated just what he could do—muffle the pain and pleasure the other might stab in. Drench her in him, slither into her senses… should she let him.
And Brenya could weep for the relief of it, resentful he had withheld this mercy until she’d called out for help. Grateful that he was tending to her now. Going liquid, the circle of his fingers around her throat a quiet promise everything would be okay.
If only she’d…
With one decisive, unhurried pull, Jules drew her flush. Chest to chest, her spine molded to the pressure of his forearm, and let her feel the shape of what was hers.
The thick line of his hard cock pressed against her lower belly, hot and heavy through saturated fabric.
Fabric soaked and sticky because he too had been forced to come, over and over, in the chain reaction of Jacques’s physical pleasure.
Because Brenya was his pair-bound mate, and what she felt, he felt.
Yet, through every spill, not a grunt. Not one hitched breath as seed had pumped from his cock.
A deliberate shift against her. Just enough to smear his scent on her rumpled shirt, dragging her into his rhythm as he dipped his head to nuzzle the soft, vulnerable skin beneath her ear.
His breath was warm, his stubble sinful as it scraped just so.
A cunning grin wove into tone and intention, Jules murmuring along the shell of her ear, “Let me make it all better.” Each syllable like a kiss. “Choose me.”
Under his control, every last cell in her body already had, a strangled vibration thrumming from the very throat he gripped in his palm as she fisted his shirt and held on for dear life.
The throat he tilted and kissed, altering his hold to expose the jagged claiming mark.
His mark.
When the edges of Jules’s teeth found their home in that tender, ruined skin. A nip. A quick, wicked flick of his tongue…
Molten glory rushed under her skin and slick splattered onto the floor, hot and humiliating, as if her bladder had emptied.
“More.” A female murmur. A softly uttered call for comfort. For something Brenya could not name.
He hummed in a way that told her there would be a cost. “More?”
To bid her follow where he would lead.
Carefully coaxing her gently toward the mental brink, daring her to take a good, long look into that endless abyss that prowled around her little island. To see what kept her safe from Jacques.
To really peer into his depths. To open fully to him.
Dip in a toe, submerge herself in their bond.
Jules crooking a mental finger, his sea seducing in undulating waves where her mind was raw and her body in pain. Made silent promises she couldn’t fathom.
Warned that there would be no more sneaking glances through her hair. No more pretending not to obsess over patterns on his skin.
And as Jules slipped up her shores, Jacques scrambled to recapture her attention, thrashing wildly in their link as he felt her drift away to a place he could not reach. “Mon chou, do not trust him!”
The relentless pull of one and the overpowering gravity of another. Yet where the Alpha roared, Jules whispered. Where Jacques demanded, Jules invited.
The cunning Beta who’d stolen an Alpha’s power, his pride, and his mate, cupped her face in his hands, met her eyes, and said again, “Choose me, Brenya.”
The hidden monster licking its lips in excited anticipation.
“Yes.” Soft as breath on bare skin.
The second her affirmation took shape, his presence surged in the bond, and she was caught.
Dragged under the surface, swallowed whole.
It wasn’t calm waters that rushed like inky poison into her mouth, her lungs, her ears, eyes.
Filling everything with creeping, inexorable carnage.
But a crawling personal hellscape full of unnamable, hideous thoughts.
Writhing corpses scrambling over one another to seize the shores of her island as if she were the haven.
A little flickering candle flame, a single light in the dark.
And it was terrifying to be so coveted.
Yet the very hand of death itself caressed Brenya inside and out. The void’s infinite tar-black eyes fixated, starved for every last crumb of her attention.
Drinking her down.
Openly plotting how to get more of her, how to steal her from the Alpha fool.
Gruesome. And somehow… beautiful.
The honest heart of a very bad man.
Who scared the absolute shit out of her… because there was something there she very much didn’t want to see. Something she knew not to look upon.
Something reaching for her.
Mentally flailing away from his sucking pull, Brenya fought to be free of his riptide, to escape before Jules made her look.
But there was no surface to swim to. No up or down.
Only endless, consuming hunger in which his thoughts flowed through hers—not violently like Jacques’s invasion, but with precision as they worked between the cracks of her thinking.
Until she couldn’t distinguish where she ended and Jules began.
“Jacques was right…” Hot tears rolling down her cheek, Brenya wavered on her feet, black spots in her vision, as she panted, “…you are deceitful.”
With a fleeting look of pity, Jules held her closer. “I have been gentle with you, Brenya. Even in this, I am being gentle.”
But it was agony the way he settled inside her. Just as painful as Jacques’s phantom knot twisted up her empty, drooling cunt.
Dark delight filled Jules’s expression as he cradled her head against his shoulder when she slumped, tenderly brushing tangled hair from her tear-streaked face. “I gave you freedom while he slept, Brenya. Autonomy to come or go as you wished. I taught you how to build a nest. I healed your body.”
Achingly intimate, tender, he kissed her flushed cheek.
Yet nothing was kind about the piercing intensity in those burning eyes as he spoke.
“You think you’ve been manipulated, that I would stoop to forcing your submission with mental tricks and theatrical orchestrations because I am what I am.
But I don’t need to force anything. I could easily take whatever I want from you in any sick way I might imagine. But have I? No.”
Jules dragged his gaze slowly over her claiming mark.
His fingertips followed, the touch possessive and deliberate as he traced each jagged edge of her disfigurement.
“I could do to you what he is doing right now, with a simple, uncontained thought. I could touch myself and make you wild with the need to come… and deny you. As I have denied myself in all these months we’ve been bonded.
I could make you beg. The Alpha fool will not extend such courtesy, now that he’s awake.
And he must be awake for you to thrive.”
“No!” Jacques would never be necessary! She hated him. Hated! And the fact that the Beta who took such care of her would allow Alpha influence to touch her short-circuited her crumbling restraint.
Gods… the scent of him was killing her. His touch burning.
She needed a knot. Needed to be filled.