45. Thea
45
Thea
T hat asshole! How dare he carry me off to his cave like a muscle-bound, hot caveman! I mean, it was all kinds of sexy if I thought about it for too long - what woman didn’t like the idea of being thrown over the shoulder of a ripped alphahole, taken to his lair, and ravished?
I’d read plenty of smutty books that explored these tropes. Books featuring hot shirtless dudes … with tentacles. Not gonna lie. My Kindle library was pretty messed up. Thank goodness nobody had access to my more depraved selections.
Kyril could go fuck himself, however. I’d come to the party with Eden, and I planned to stick with her until she left for her bed. My friend was way too trusting, which was a surprise given who her family was. If I ever met her cousins, I fully intended to lecture them about their dereliction of duty.
Did they not know the dangers young women faced these days? At the very least, they should have taught her some self-defense skills. As far as I could tell, Eden’s best skill was talking someone into a coma. Or killing them slowly with shit Netflix movies.
I emerged from the trees and rejoined the party. The bonfire blazed while people danced and laughed and alcohol flowed. In the short time I’d been gone, more students had arrived.
Pretty lights twinkled in the trees, glowing like tiny stars. The smell of cooked meat from the hog roast set up near the entrance to the cafeteria made my stomach growl. A hot pork roll sounded perfect, so I wandered over in that direction, scanning the crowd.
There was no sign of Eden. She better be OK. If anything had happened to her while Kyril kidnapped me, I would disembowel the Russian bastard and strangle him with his own intestines.
“Thea!” I spun around to see Eden stumbling toward me, alone.
“Are you alright?”
She grinned. “Yep, Michael is fetching me some water.” Bonus points to Michael. Unless he’d spiked her water, in which case he was a dead man walking. “Where are your men?” The hiccup at the end of her question told me Eden was drunker than she looked.
“They’re not my men.” My brain registered outrage at the idea of claiming those assholes, but my pussy danced the hula at the thought of being sandwiched between the three of them.
“Sure about that?” Eden giggled and then hiccuped again. “They seem rather fixated on you. Kyril never usually looks at a woman unless he’s in the mood to fuck. And that’s only ever when he’s drunk or high on adrenaline from a fight.” She leaned forward and ended up falling into me. “I think he has issues,” she whispered-shouted.
“They all have issues,” I muttered mutinously. “They all need to fuck the hell off and leave me alone.” OK, not all of them.
Milo was sweet. Milo could stick around. We’d formed a connection when he confessed he had no experience with women. Knowing I wasn’t the only virgin on campus made me feel less of a freak.
That said, I was pretty pissed with him for allowing Kyril to carry me away like pirate bounty.
Kyril would make a sexy pirate, my pussy reminded me with a coquettish giggle. Then my brain helpfully supplied an image of Kyril wearing harem pants and a large cutlass on his hip. It was hot enough to make my skin burn and my core clench.
Maybe I needed to move further away from the bonfire. Or ask the college doctor for an HRT script. Were hot flushes a thing in 19-year-old females?
Asking for a friend.
Michael reappeared with a bottle of water and handed it to Eden. She snapped the seal and glugged some down. “No more alcohol, sweetheart,” he warned with a sappy smile before sliding an arm around her waist.
The guy was cute in a boy-next-door sort of way. Too preppy for my tastes, but from the way Eden stared up at him with heart eyes, I guess she was into that type. If he made her happy and wasn’t a douche like Matt, the art student she’d hooked up with, I was happy for her. Hopefully, he knew how to please a girl. Unlike Matt, the five-second Wonder Boy.
“You’re so cute,” Eden said with a dreamy smile.
“So are you,” he replied, beaming down at her.
Pass me a bucket . These two were so sweet I was in danger of succumbing to diabetes.
“So, now you’re all OK and everything, I’m going to head—” I broke off mid-sentence when a loud yell from the trees captured my attention.
“Thea! You better run, kotenok!”
Adrenaline flooded my system, sending my pulse rate through the roof. For fuck’s sake . Kyril had followed me back to the party, and now he sounded really pissed off. Well, shit.
It was time for me to go, exit stage left.
“Run, Thea, run!” Eden jumped up and down with excitement. Was she deranged? This wasn’t a game of hide and seek!
“You better leave,” Michael advised. “Dunno what you did to piss him off, but when he loses his shit, he really loses it.” He shuddered and pulled Eden away. They melted into the crowd of happy, shiny people, drinking and dancing like it was 1999, leaving me alone in a pocket of cold air.
After a short and fruitless argument with myself - yes, I was well on the way to a schizophrenia diagnosis - I took Michael’s advice. Staying here would only result in violence. Kyril might think he was bigger and stronger than me, but I was more than willing to fight back.
Since it would take too long to shove my way through the hordes of students congregating around the bonfire, I took the pathway that skirted the trees and led around the back of the main building, close to the art studios where Eden spent most of her time. It was well-lit but deserted. Almost everyone on campus was at the party.
Every sinister rustle from the shadows ratcheted up the tension to danger levels. It was like being stalked by a psychopath. Any minute now, Ghostface would jump out from the trees wielding a huge knife.
I almost hoped he did. With this much adrenaline in my system, I needed some kind of release.
The sound of something or someone moving through the trees to my right jolted me out of my thoughts. I pulled a blade from my boot and hurried on. Just as I reached the corner of the main building, the overhead light flickered and died, leaving me in darkness.
“Thea…” taunted a disembodied voice with a Russian accent. The lunatic was hunting me. He clearly thought I was some weak little rabbit while he was the big, bad wolf.
It was time I taught that asshole a lesson.