Page 155 of Vengeful Gods

Every muscle in my body clenches as I listen to Ky unleash over speakerphone. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. He explains the events from inside the club, the ones Foxglove had been threatened to conceal under some flimsy excuse of protecting us.

Motherfucking rat.

As he rants into the phone, my pulse ratchets into a frenzy. I’m a cobra with dripping fangs.

They saw everything that man tried to do to our girl.

They heard nearly everything, too.

Miles Crane has just ensured his head is going to be ripped from his shoulders and tossed on a bonfire.

I’ve got one hand gripped around her thigh so hard this girl will be wearing my fingerprints for a month.

“We’re on our way back to the compound.” I bark over the speaker, and the line goes dead, Foxglove’s trembling hand still clutches my phone.

“Thorne.” She hardly breathes as my name echoes into the charged silence.

“Were you going to tell me?” My teeth clench together in an attempt to keep my voice calm.

She works down a lump in her throat.

“You put a tracker in me?” Her refusal to answer my question makes my molars grind to dust.

“This is how I take care of my property.”

“Without my permission…”

Slamming on the brakes, I pull the car over onto the side of this deserted stretch of road. Tall trees surround us in heavy shadows.

My snarl is a low vibration right through my abdomen. “Goddamn it, Foxglove, you belong to us. How else do you think we would find you if someone else tried to take you?”

Her eyes widen at me, pink lips hang open.

“Would you rather end up bleeding and broken, all because someone like that man thought he could dare take you from us when we weren’t looking?”

“He wouldn’t succeed.”

“There are a hundred more like him where he came from who want to take you from me.” And a hundred more after that who want to do foul things to her.

“You know I’m yours.” Brushing her fingertips over the back of my hand in a gentle caress, my chest aches in response. I don’t miss the way she winces as my fingers dig in tighter to her pliable, soft flesh.

“How the fuck am I supposed to protect you in all of this?” Somehow, I’m holding myself back from exploding, but only just.

The thing is, I’ve known right from the start that I’d ruin this girl if I got too close to her, and yet here I am. She’s next to me, pressed back in her seat with pupils dilated, pouty goddamn lips parted, and pink spots high on her cheeks.

The longer I’ve tried to resist her, stay away from her, the further my obsession has tunneled down and festered away deep inside.

“You are protecting me.”

“Don’t fucking look at me like that,” I snap.

“Like what?” Her chest rises and falls and the tiny breathy way she says those words has my pulse kicking up a thousand notches.

“Like you want—no, like you’re going to beg me to devour you alive.”

My girl makes a barely there noise filled with need. And it’s the final tether that breaks. I’m fucking done for.

Leaning close so I can inhale every delicate note of pear blossom and jasmine and that hint of coconut— the one that immediately reminds me of holding her while tucked away in our island escape—my nostrils flare. “Sweetheart, if I wasn’t one second from losing my goddamn mind I would drag you out of that seat, bend you over the hood, and show you exactly how much I own you. I would sink my cock inside you on the side of this road, mark you the fuck up, and leave you under no illusion that I absolutely will eat your entire fucking soul…whether you want me to, or not.”

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