19
COOPER
What.
The.
Fuck.
There’s a rampage inside of me, a torrential rain of emotions slamming into me over and over again, trying to make sense of themselves and push to the forefront. Relief is in the lead, but a close second is the overwhelming apprehension, followed by a heavy dose of horror and confusion.
“Love . . .” Scotty voice is unsteady, almost breaking. And he’s wary, I can tell, as he takes in the set of blackish-crimson irises revealed to us with our Bonded’s eyes back open. But not wary enough as he reaches out—
He’s launched off the bed with a bellow.
“What—” Spine snapping straight along with all the other men’s, Alby’s head whips all around him, eyelids stretching impossibly wide in a flash. He can’t seem to decide whether he’s meant to be checking on Scotty or Ezla, brain likely too scrambled, just as mine is, to even form a coherent thought.
And none of us have time to before Ezla’s elbow cracks into Tate’s face.
“Fuck!” Blood spurts, and he clutches his nose as he yanks himself away from her. He’s off the bed in an instant, looking only stunned for once rather than giving the impression he’s feeling any sort of arousal here. Because even he knows something is very, very wrong.
Tiger scrambles backwards, the lack of understanding clear in his huge blue eyes along with pain and alarm. “E-Ez—Ezzy?! What—what are you doing?!”
Scotty has straightened, and he drags Alby backwards as Ezla rises slowly, her stare scanning over the five of us as I come to complete the line my brothers have made at the foot of the bed, the towels that were in our hands long forgotten.
It’s eerie, and not in the way I’ve come to like, as those matching crimson eyes take us in, observing, cataloguing.
Her head tilts a fraction, and I swallow thickly.
Scotty holds his hands up, keeping his movements slow and non-threatening. “Ezla, Love . . . it’s us. It’s just us . . . your men.”
My heart drops right down to my feet as I finally process what’s happening.
Joseph’s done it. He’s . . . changed her.
My chest spasms with unbearable pain, a suffocating ball lodging itself in my throat.
“No . . .” Alby says hoarsely, and I can hear his own heart breaking in the single syllable as he, too, catches on.
“Havoc.” Tate’s mutter is gruff, hand stained red to match the fluid dripping from his nostrils. Intense eyes on her as always, he shifts a fraction of an inch forwards.
But he stops dead at Scotty’s warning look, following his silent order without question in a miracle instance, because we all know how delicate this situation is.
Rising onto her knees in the centre of our Bonded bed, Ezla’s head moves deliberately, attention taking its time picking apart each detail of the room, as if she’s never been in here before.
It stutters on the pile of gold we’ve kept by the wall since the Halfway Ball, waiting for her to come and collect it, almost like we could lure her back to this room with the jewellery. Then moves on.
But I know no one missed that.
Scotty catches my gaze, and, ever so discreetly, he nudges his chin to the right while our Bonded’s attention is diverted.
Dipping my head just marginally in response, I begin to edge in that direction, and from my peripheral as I keep my eyes lasered in on Vengeance, I note a large form doing the same, inching around to the left side of the bed, while Tiger and Alby stay in place either side of Scotty at the end of it.
“Love . . .”
Heart slamming against my ribcage, I watch as that void stare moves back to Scotty.
He holds out his hand, arm extended towards her, and my posture tenses further. “Love, come here. I won’t hurt you.”
I’m trying hard to trust him here, to follow his lead, but my trepidation only grows as our Bonded’s features remain expressionless.
She seems like a true predator here. Not human, but a creature whose only aim, whose only thought, is to destroy her prey.
That unnatural gaze seems to see right through Scotty, all the way into his soul.
And her lack of emotion isn’t uncommon when she has a mask on so often, but it’s never been like this.
Like, even though we can feel her again, she’s not really here at all.
It makes me realise just how much that mask has dropped over the weeks, how drastically things had changed around the time of the Ball for this sight to be so debilitating. Her absence is a gaping hole within me, and I just want my Vengeance back.
And her iris . . . that beautiful coffee brown . . .
What happened to your eye, Vengeance?
I want to ask her, but I know that would be worse than zero help here, so I stay silent, letting Scotty continue to do the talking.
His fingers curl in a beckoning motion, and he steps closer to the bed. “Come on, Love. I just want to check your eye. I need to make sure you’re okay.”
Head cocking again, she considers him.
Then she begins to prowl towards him.
A soft huff of breath leaves Scotty, his shoulders loosening marginally. “Good girl,” he murmurs softly, moving even closer.
Thinning my eyes, I study Ezla carefully—her advance on all fours, each calculated movement of her body, the intensity of those blackish-crimson eyes on him . . . The closer she gets to him, the more unsettled I become, insides shifting, all of me on edge.
“Scotty . . .” I warn, tone low.
And the moment his gaze leaves her, just for a second, to communicate with me—she pounces.
Shouts ring out sharply as Ezla jumps on him, and they crash to the floor. I dive over to them in a heartbeat, abandoning any notions of boxing her in with Tate.
“Don’t hurt her, Cooper!” Scotty yells out as we both attempt to get Ezla off him. Then he curses as a particularly brutal blow from her slams his head back, where it smacks into the unforgiving taalk.
“I’m not going to fucking hurt her! I’m trying to stop her from hurting you!” I fire back, managing to grasp Ezla’s shoulders before the wind’s knocked out of me as I’m tossed to the ground.
“Up we get, Havoc.” Tate tries his luck next, attempting to grab her underarms, Tiger rushing into the fray with him, while Alby’s frozen in place, drenched in undiluted horror as he takes in the scene.
But her foot drags a choking noise from him before he can dodge the kick aimed for his chest, and Tiger’s sprawled out on the floor with a pained cry just as I’ve managed to get back to my feet.
Rolling, Scotty somehow manages to pin Ezla beneath him, but it’s not for long, and we’re not doing too well when we’re trying so hard to restrain rather than harm her.
He’s wincing from the bruising blow her knee delivered to his stomach when she springs up and lunges Tate’s way, the whack!
whack! whack! of rapid hits connecting sounding out as he goes on the defence, blocking her merciless punches as fast as possible.
I’ve raced forwards, and she swivels around at breakneck speed to stop me from grabbing her, zipping out of mine and Tate’s reach before our fingers can even graze her.
“Ez! Ezzy, stop!” Tiger cries, shooting after me with Alby, who’s back in motion but so overwhelmed he appears as if he might pass out any second now.
I don’t register why their panic increases tenfold in the next second until I realise where Ezla’s heading: to the chair in the corner where we’ve neatly piled her belongings.
Including her unguarded armoury sticks.
Fuck. She gets even one of them and we’re dead.
“VENGEANCE!” I roar, but the savage strength of it doesn’t completely overwhelm the utter terror in there too.
I’m less scared about any devastating damage being done to me than I am of having to truly fight back if she gets her hands on a weapon.
It’s hard enough as it is to make myself fight her during training.
There’s so much noise, the ruckus so loud, that I almost miss Alby’s whimpered, “E-Ezla.” But I couldn’t possibly when his slimmer frame shoves past all of us and he makes it to her first, arms banding around her crushingly.
The force sends them both crashing down before Ezla can reach the chair, and Alby grits his teeth, tears streaming down his face as his lip splits under her answering lethal swing.
But still, his hold doesn’t relent, and she lets out her first sound to tell me and my brothers that our Bonded is actually in there, that she can at least feel something, even if it’s just rage—her snarl isn’t exactly inviting, but she might as well have just collared me and tugged on the leash with the way my entire being demands to be closer to hers.
“Someone grab her armoury sticks!” Scotty’s voice rises over the commotion, and Tiger attempts to leap after the two of them, but with lightning-fast reflexes, Ezla whips her arm out and catches his ankle, and he crashes to the ground with a yelp.
“What about the chains like in Game 1?!” Alby calls out desperately, shielding his face from more blows that come his way with Vengeance’s attention returning to him before she’s forced to deal with me too when I crowd her with Tate and Scotty.
Whipping up, we’re then dancing around each other, and there’s too much going on, not a moment I can spare to even make an attempt with Alby’s suggestion.
I manage to catch Ezla’s leg on a roundhouse kick that would have otherwise knocked my lights out, but that doesn’t stop her other one from leaving the floor as she uses Tate’s thick arms that had been reaching for her as support to flip her body at an angle before using her grip on the beast of a man and the momentum to drag him right down to the ground.
Scotty only just manages to avoid her leg swinging out and tripping him up when she lands a split second later without pausing her movements.