Page 8 of Malevolent King

“Don’t test you?” I demanded, my numb lips slurring my words. “You shot Gino.”

“I’ve shot many people. What’s your point?” He sounded bored at my display of emotion.

A streak of tears escaped my eyes, and I tried to blink them away, but it wasn’t working. Nikolai followed the salty trail, his striking face impassive.

“Are you going to shoot me, too?”

“Are you going to make me?” he asked softly. “If all I wanted were to shoot you, you’d have been dead when you considered marrying my brother.”

“Don’t pretend that hurt your feelings. You don’t have any to hurt,” I whispered, my words like hooked barbs, hoping to get under his skin.

He smiled, but there was nothing warm in it. “That’s where you’re wrong, little swallow in the locked cage. I know you better than you think. I’ve seen inside before you learned how to lie so prettily.”

He reached behind him, and the light glinted off the knife that appeared in his hand. He brought the knife to my cheek. I stilled, barely breathing. He softly trailed it, not cutting, just threatening, down the slope of my neck, to the top button of my shirt. A quick slice beneath the button sent it rolling away.

“Don’t forget who you’re dealing with, prom queen. I still remember how beautiful you were… covered in blood. I long to see it again.”

Prom queen.The title brought that night screaming back to my mind.“It was your blood I was covered in, as I remember,” I forced the words out, despite my urge to cower from his touch. The locked box of our violent, dark past threatened to bust wide open and spill the secrets I needed to keep safe.

“My blood, your blood, it doesn’t matter. No one sees you like I see you, and no one ever will. We’re connected, you and I, and we both know it. I would tell you to stop fighting it, but I find your fear so intoxicating.” He leaned in, pressing his face into the nook of my neck and shoulder. His hot tongue touched my skin, licking a wet, scorching stripe all the way up.

I shivered. My skin felt like it was trying to crawl right off—to get away from the madman above me, or closer, I didn’t know.

I’d long ago given up trying to understand my body’s reaction to this man. My nerves buzzed. Hate, attraction, shock, and relief hummed in undercurrents beneath my skin. I didn’t know which was which. Most of all, I thought how odd it was to feel comforted by the touch of the man threatening to kill you. That’s what happened when you isolated a person so thoroughly they became touch-starved, that even a knife to the throat felt like a caress.

He reached my jaw and trailed kisses along it. I tried to turn my head, and the knife pricked under my jaw.

“Open your eyes,” he instructed deeply.

The knife at my jugular was enough of an incentive. I opened them to find his mercurial gaze taking up my entire vision. Like I was drowning in the gray of him. Those distracting eyes were as beautiful as they were when I was seventeen, smiling at a handsome stranger in a bar, trying my best to appear older than I was. I’d had no idea I’d caught the eye of a predator who would never give up the hunt.

He leaned in and brushed his lips against mine.

“I thought I was just your insurance?” My words came out more of a breathy plea than a question, and I hated myself for it.

“Right, my insurance,” he repeated. His gaze tracked over my face, lingering on all the planes and hollows like he was committing me to memory. “You open your mouth, and I forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That I’m supposed to be escaping.”

I swallowed, casting about for words to navigate the tense and wild feeling I was getting from Nikolai. Like always, he was dangerously unpredictable.

“You could always just take me back if you’ve given up on escaping,” I muttered.

Niko laughed, his intense face transforming. He’d always been beautiful, like a rebellious Romanov prince, with his aristocratic face, a multitude of scars, and ink. His devil-may-care attitude was another draw to him. Well, it had been to the seventeen-year-old me. I’d never met someone so free and uncaring of what others thought. That curiosity had cost me dearly.

“Would you visit me if I let your father tie me up in his kinky little torture chamber?”

“Let’s try it and see,” I offered.

He laughed again. It felt safer to diffuse his dark anger than have it directed at me or an innocent bystander.

“You haven’t changed, Sofia. You’re still as captivating and strong-willed as ever,” he murmured, leaning in and kissing me hard.

With the knife preventing my head from turning, I had no choice but to open to him as his tongue forced its way inside my mouth. “Kissed” is hardly a strong enough term for the way he took my lips, biting and sucking. He wasn’t gentle, and I shivered in his arms as I realized I didn’t want him to be.

When he touched me, I forgot who he was. I forgotwhathe was. A dangerous psychopath. A killer without remorse. Even knowing it didn’t stop my body from warming at his touch. His brutality should scare me. It should make my body numb and cold, but it didn’t. The dark truth I harbored inside was that it had the opposite effect.

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