Page 142 of Twilight Sins

“He forced me into his car,” Mariya sobs, clinging to Nik. “I didn’t want to go.”

Ryder’s eyes go wide. He shakes his head. “She wanted it. I wasn’t going to fuck her anyway. Just fool around. We were just?—”

Every ounce of rage I’ve swallowed down in the last hour rises up like a fucking tsunami. There’s no controlling it.

I wrench Ryder off of the couch. He grabs at my hands, trying to fight me off, but he doesn’t stand a fucking chance.

My vision is red as I slam his head down on the corner of the only sturdy-looking piece of furniture in the room. Blood splatters across the surface. Rivulets of red drain onto the stained carpet. The coffee table groans with each blow of his skull against the wood, but it doesn’t buckle.

So I do it again.

And again.

And again.

Ryder’s body is limp and lifeless before I finally force myself to stop.

Even as I throw his corpse on the sofa, the fury in me is nowhere near spent.

When I turn around, Mariya isn’t looking at the dead man behind me or the blood. She’s used to it. More accustomed to the violence than I wish she was. There are tear tracks on her face, but she isn’t crying anymore. Now, her eyes are locked on mine.

“Where is Luna?” she croaks.

“What in the fuck were you thinking, Mariya? You could have been killed.”

She frowns. “He wasn’t going to kill me.”

“Raping you isn’t exactly a prize, sis,” Nik adds. “This is bad.”

The failure that tonight could have been plays on repeat in the back of my head. If I’d been a few minutes late getting to the club. If I’d wasted another minute yelling at Luna in the alley. One wrong turn. One missed clue. And bam, fucking disaster.

“They never should have made it past the gate,” I growl to Nik.

He clenches his jaw tight. As head of security, that was his failure as much as mine. He knows it. “I’m going to handle it. They’ll tighten up. They thought Luna was allowed to exit.”

Again, her name shifts uncomfortably inside of me.

“I lied to her,” Mariya says quickly. “She didn’t know. I told her I had your permission. It isn’t her fault.”

I ignore Mariya and look to Nik. “Take her home.”

“Yakov!” she snaps. “Listen to me. It wasn’t her fault. I lied to her about?—”

“Go home!” I yell so loud my voice rattles the walls.

Mariya jerks back, eyes wide. She retreats into Nikandr’s chest and my brother whips her towards the door.

The doorway is still a mangled mouth of shredded wood, so there isn’t much privacy. But this will do.

It’s enough for me to finally, mercifully, crack open the box in my chest. The black beast slips out and curls around my heart just as I curl my hand around Sergey’s neck.

The man has been cowering in the corner since I bashed his friend’s skull in. Now, he’s dangling from my grip, whispering what sounds like a prayer.

“If there’s a God, He turned His back on you a long time ago, my friend.”

I throw him at the bloodied coffee table. He hits the floor and rises instantly to his knees. “Please. Please. I never touched your sister. I didn’t want any of this to happen. It was all him—Ryder. It was his idea.”

“And where was Ryder when you had your hands on my woman?” I snarl.

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