Page 96 of Princes of Carnage

He reaches for my hair again, grabbing it roughly in his fist and tugging my head back.

“I’ll take her mouth,” he tells his friends. “Caleb, you can have her pussy. Gio, you get her ass.”

At the sound of his words, something inside me snaps. Even with the three of them surrounding me, I’ve been trying to keep a low profile, to not make a scene—knowing that if I do, it could ruin this whole mission and destroy our chances of ever talking to Vincent. But terror washes over me in a sudden cold wave, memories of being assaulted by that gang surging through my mind.

Not again.

Never again.

“What the fuck is going on here?”

The deep, angry voice cuts through my panic a little, and I look up to see Atlas shoving his way through the crowd toward us. The man gripping my hair releases it, but he loops an arm around my waist as he turns to face Atlas, pinning me against his body.

“What does it look like?” He chuckles, and his friends laugh too. “We found a beautiful little flower that needs defiling.”

“Don’t worry.” The man named Gio smirks beneath his mask, which is designed in the shape of a wolf’s head. “We’ll take her up on the stage so you can watch.”

Atlas’s hands curl into fists. “Like hell you will.”

The one called Caleb snorts. “What’s your problem, man? Jealous that we saw her first?”

“You didn’t see her first.” Atlas’s voice is low, so full of fury that I almost don’t recognize it. “And you have no fucking claim on her. She came with me. She’s mine.”

I swallow, my pulse thrumming like a hummingbird’s wings. I didn’t know how to feel about it when he told the man at the door that I was his, but in this moment, hearing him growl the word ‘mine’ sends an almost visceral feeling of relief through me.

It feels like a lifeline. Like a promise of safety.

The three men around me hesitate, glancing at each other. Then the man holding me looks back at Atlas. “She’s yours?”

“Yes,” he bites out.

I feel the man behind me draw in a breath, as if he’s considering that. Then he makes a noise in his throat. “Alright. Then you take her up on the stage.”

Atlas freezes. “What?”

The man behind me huffs a laugh, his breath stirring my hair. “You said she’s yours. So prove it.”

Caleb, whose mask is a deep black color with red around the eyes, takes a step forward. “Good idea. Give us all a show. She’s too pretty to waste.”

He gestures from Atlas to me, then to the people around us. A chill creeps up my spine as I realize how many patrons of the club are watching us, their attention drawn by the action and the raised voices.

We’ve drawn a crowd.

My gaze darts to the edges of the room, and I notice that several of the guards stationed there are watching as well, their expressions hard.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I don’t know all the rules of Eros, but I do know that it’s nothing like the kink club I went to where I met up with Phan—with Killian. And I have a feeling that if we break the rules or draw the wrong kind of attention, we might not make it out of here alive.

I look up at Atlas, locking eyes with him. I can see my own thoughts reflected back at me in his firelight eyes, and he clenches his jaw suddenly, taking one long stride closer and yanking me roughly out of the other man’s grasp.

I stumble a little before I collide with Atlas’s chest, caught off guard by the lightning fast movement. The man behind me must not have seen it coming either, because he mutters something angrily under his breath, clearly pissed about Atlas taking away his toy.

Atlas looks over my head at the man and his two friends, staring them down. Tension thickens the air around us, the threat of violence filling the space like an electric charge. I glance at the crowd again, then at the guards, painfully aware of how badly outnumbered Atlas and I are.

“Quinn.”

Atlas’s voice is quiet and intense, and my gaze snaps back to meet his. His mouth is set, and even with the mask he’s wearing, I can read the tension in his face.

---