33. Silas #3
“I could go into the city,” Dez said, coming around the corner without any indication the fucker had been standing there listening. “Find someone who deserves to be drained.”
“Absolutely not,” Syneca said.
“I thought you’d react that way.” He lifted a shoulder. “I could try to find—”
“No.” Her voice was sharp and final and then she went quiet.
Fuck.
I’d learned to hate her silences. They always meant she’d already decided something reckless and was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up to it.
“It needs to be me.”
Every part of me locked up. Not anger first. Not even jealousy. Just this ugly, visceral ache that hit so hard it felt like something had wrapped around my ribs and started pulling.
Dez answered before I could. “No.”
She rolled her eyes like we were the unreasonable ones. “It’s the most logical—”
“No.” The word came out rough enough to scrape my throat raw.
She glared, the challenge in her eyes almost tangible. “My power. My soul. My choice.”
I stepped toward her before I even realized I’d moved. “You pull from my power through the bond. That makes it my choice too.”
“No. It doesn’t. We’re two separate people no matter what you did the day you and Gran took that fucking choice from me.”
“I said no and that’s final.” Because all I could see was Dez with his hands on her, taking from her while she stood there and let him. Something violent shifted within me.
“She’s not wrong,” Dez said quietly.
I looked at him. At the calm expression. The restraint. Like he was pretending this was simple and necessary. Like he wasn’t a demon being handed the one thing in this realm I would crush cities to keep untouched.
“You go near her,” I said softly, “and I will—”
“Finish that sentence,” Syneca cut in, stepping between us. “What exactly will you do?”
My eyes stayed on Dez.
Because the answer was easy.
Everything.
She watched me. Reading everything I hadn’t said. I felt her moving through the bond, pressing at the edges of what I was holding back, and I locked it down as hard as I could.
Eventually she softened, and that was a thousand times worse because it meant she’d seen me. She’d known the effect. “You don’t have to watch.”
I spoke before I could stop myself. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
She held her hand out to him. “Go ahead.”
Every instinct in me screamed to interfere.
But something in me knew he’d be able to stop.
If I truly didn’t believe it, the bond would force me to protect her.
Still, Dez hesitated before taking her wrist, fingers wrapping carefully around it like he understood exactly how close to death he was standing.
The room went unnaturally still after that.
No violence. No struggle.
Just Syneca inhaling sharply the second he started pulling. I felt it through the bond before I even saw it hit her. Power.
Not mine. Not hers. Something darker moving beneath her skin like liquid heat, and the second Dez drew it out of her, her entire body reacted. Her back arched slightly. A broken sound slipped from her throat.
My stomach turned viciously.
Because she liked it.
No. Worse.
Her body did.
Pleasure slammed through the bond hard enough to make my vision blur for half a second, and suddenly I could feel all of it. The rush flooding her veins. The dizzy warmth. The unbearable pull of release as Dez took and took and took.
“Easy,” Dez murmured, his eyes locked on me, fear an undercurrent in his stoic expression.
I wanted to rip his fucking jaw off.
Syneca’s breathing had gone uneven now, her lips parting as another wave rolled through her. Her fingers tightened around Dez’s arm, and that tiny movement nearly snapped something inside me clean in half.
The bond poured every piece of her into me whether I wanted it or not. The pleasure. The surrender. The way her pulse kicked faster every time he drew more power from her body.
And underneath all of it was me.
My jealousy poisoning the connection. My obsession wrapping around every feeling until I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began anymore.
I shouldn’t have been able to feel this.
Shouldn’t have known the exact moment her knees weakened.
Shouldn’t have known how flushed she was.
Shouldn’t have known she was trying not to make another sound.
I couldn’t breathe.
Because part of me was furious.
And another monstrous part of me was staring at her trembling in another man’s hold and thinking mine.
Mine.
Mine.
The thought disgusted me almost as much as it consumed me.
“Silas,” she breathed softly, like she could feel me unraveling through the bond too.
That broke whatever control I had left. I turned before I did something unforgivable. Before I dragged Dez off her by force. Before I begged them to stop.
I braced both hands against the wall and tried to breathe through the thing clawing its way up my throat while, behind me, through the bond I suddenly wished had never existed, her body ached for another man.
I clenched my teeth through the fucking torture of her inching toward a release that had nothing to do with me as I waited for Dez to take his fucking fill…
of what wasn’t mine and never could be. Her grandmother had seen to that.