Page 32 of Wreck Me

He tensed at my command, resisting at first as always. He was a hardcore alpha male and taking orders from anyone flew in the face of that.

But his resistance was fleeting, and he submitted to me, albeit with an agitated grunt, crossing to one of the chairs and slumping down onto it.

He sucked in a breath in a bid to calm himself and then managed to speak in a somewhat calmer tone. “Look, I know I overdid it on that last op, but it was one fuck-up. I was just off that night. It doesn’t mean I can’t—”

“It wasn’t merely one out-of-character misstep, Damien. Your actions had been building to a cataclysm and despite Bastian’s attempts to reel you in, you continued to lose control every time you were out in the field. Your bloodlust drove your every action, superseding rational thought, commonsense, and the collective good of us all. You almost compromised us entirely.”

“Look, I need—”

“That’s just it. You’ve come to need it. And for the wrong reasons. It’s become a dangerous addiction. It’s not about justice to you. You’re carrying out a dark and twisted reckoning and I won’t allow you to use us to accomplish that and feed your baser desires. Take that to the underground fighting circuits, or to Obscura. They can accommodate those needs.”

“It’s not the same.” He paused for a moment. “Hold up? Obscura… was that an invitation to join you at your favored sex club? Oh, I’m sorry… private lifestyle club?”

“We’re not sexually compatible.”

“How would you know? You’ve always spurned my interest because you didn’t want to muddy the waters with Seb being your best friend and my little brother.”

“I only top, Damien.”

“Sometimes you let Caleb top you.”

“That’s different. The way it occurs is different, very specific, and a unique situation that can’t be replicated.”

“I call bullshit,” he said, his gaze raking over me in a none-too-subtle eye-fucking.

That was him through and through. Utterly brazen and brash. Very little restraint. It didn’t rub well with somebody like me—or Bastian who had undergone an almost debilitating battle with control a couple of years back. It was another reason why I’d removed Damien from our nightly operations. Seeing that up close, Damien being in that headspace where consequences didn’t exist, where everything was a free-for-all and he was unleashed, it was a temptation for Bastian. It was rubbing salt into wounds that had barely healed, wounds that would, in all likelihood, never actually heal in their entirety.

Damien slicked his tongue over his bottom lip and spread his thighs as he looked at me through hooded eyes.

“I’m sure we can work something out, King.”

“I’m sure that we can’t.”

He sneered, never one to take any sort of rejection well, and moved to speak, to argue his futile point further.

But I held up my hand, my eyes flashing. “It’s done.”

He wanted it too much from me, serving to only highlight his desperation to feed that addiction further. If he couldn’t veer off this dangerous path he’d set out on, I’d have to take action against him. It would mean a hell of a lot more than merely reeling him in and cutting him out of our nightly operations.

It would mean putting him down, something Bastian and I had an agreement about, something he’d beseeched me long ago to not do, no matter the circumstances.

It wasn’t always easy when it came to Damien Thorn.

At my age of twenty-three, he was a year older than Caleb, and two years older than Bastian, but immaturity levels were off the charts with Damien, compared to them. Staggeringly so sometimes.

And if he continued in this vein, I’d have to break my vow to Bastian.

I saw him gritting his teeth, not liking the shutdown from me.

He shifted his weight, sitting forward in the chair as he said, “Funny you should utter your go-to shutdown phrase at me, because that’s exactly what my little brother used the other day in the Luxe lot to stop me. He invoked you. Your orders, apparently.”

“Correct.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“I want to know what’s up with the girl. Skylar Bennett.”

---