Chapter 38
COLE
“He’s mine!”
Kate was a goddamn child. She was eight years old. Pyotr Fucking Tarasov forced her to make decisions like she was reading some action-adventure book. He made her part of his sickness, compelled her to be an accomplice in her own rape.
There’s no corner of the universe where that should have happened to her. Even if she was the evil child she thinks she was, she didn’t deserve that pain. She was a loyal daughter, a protective sister… She was good.
And she still is good.
She shouldn’t have anything to do with the monster hanging in my dungeon.
She shouldn’t have to smell the acrid piss that’s pooled beneath his feet.
She shouldn’t have to see his pale paunch, his hairy back, the flaccid worm between his legs.
She shouldn’t have to hear him whimpering, his teeth chattering against the steel of my Magnum, his garbled pleading as he begs for his fucking life.
I can do this for her. I can take the shot. I can get the gunshot residue on my hands and the spray of blood and brains on my face.
She deserves to have someone protect her. Someone to keep her safe. As a child, she was left to her own devices. As a young woman, she was betrayed by the family she tried to protect.
I’m her husband. Her Dom. The man who loves her. I should kill Tarasov, here, now, and be done with it. Let her set down her burden. Help her to heal. And Jesus Fucking Christ, never, ever have her call me Master again.
“He’s mine, Cole,” she says, and now her voice is level. “Don’t do it. Don’t take the shot. He belongs to me.”
She’s the one who suffered. She has matching ladders of scars on her thighs to prove it. She has a lifetime of nightmares barely kept at bay by a light left on while she sleeps.
“Cole,” she says.
She’s my wife. My sub. She needs me.
So I take my gun out of Tarasov’s mouth.
I force myself to take three long steps away from where he hangs.
I offer Kate the revolver.
And I wait.