Page 58 of Captive Souls

Depraved fuck I was, it was turning me on. I was desperate to throw Piper down on the table and fuck her until I felt like I was glued to her fucking insides.

I had been about to do just that before her sister burst in to save the day. An apt interruption as that was a terrible idea.

Still, the roaring, famished beast inside of me, usually sated by blood, longed for her. And only her.

She bit her lip as she dug deeper. She was nervous. But determined. She had toyed with the idea of leaving me to possibly bleed out and make her escape. I’d seen a shadow fall over her eyes as she considered it. That moment of indecision made me so fucking proud of her. For feeding that dark part of herself that she’d starved for years.

I knew it existed because if it didn’t, she’d hate me for the evil man I was, feel no longing for me. No compassion.

Her tongue poked out to caress her lips as she further concentrated. Pain speared through me, and pleasure mixed in. I wanted her to dig deeper. Fuck, I wanted her to wrap her palm around my heart, fingernails piercing as she squeezed with all of her might. I didn’t care if it killed me if the last beat of that ruined organ would be in her hands.

A worthy death.

“Got it!” she declared, a girlish grin lighting up her face as she pried the bullet from my flesh. Luckily it was still whole, no small shards that would be impossible for her to tweeze out and might’ve eventually killed me.

I winced, not at the sting but at the loss of her touch. She held the small metal object between her fingers, holding it up to the light, inspecting it.

“Such a small thing to have the power to create so much damage,” she mused.

I stared right at her. “I was thinking the same thing.”

Her body jerked when her eyes met mine, catching the meaning of the words I shouldn’t have even uttered in the first place. Most especially not with her sister within earshot.

Dangerous. I was walking a dangerous fucking line. Toying with a kind of disaster even I knew I couldn’t weather.

Piper’s gaze traveled to my shoulder.

“I need to stitch that,” she whispered, nodding to the wound.

I nodded back.

If only it were possible to stitch the ugly wound she’d torn inside of me.

Piper

“This is really good. Did you make it?” Daisy asked, gesturing to the couscous with her fork.

“Knox made it,” I told her before returning my attention to the needle I was threading. Not before I saw the disbelieving raise of her eyebrows.

“They teach Moroccan cuisine at psychopath school?” she asked him sweetly.

He didn’t answer her, but he did give her one of his patented chilling looks.

She didn’t so much as flinch, which both surprised and worried me. For all of her dramatics, Daisy was a delicate person, easily hurt. Yet the look from one of the most dangerous men in the world didn’t even scare her. What had she gone through since I’d been taken that gave her that shield?

“How did you even find me?” I demanded, keeping my eyes focused on the bloody hole in Knox’s shoulder. My hands were steady, even though I was absolutely freaking out inside. This was a gunshot wound. I had experience with knee scrapes and ‘boo boos’. But the first aid training I was required to keep up with didn’t go so far as to cover how to treat a gunshot wound.

Digging in to get the bullet out had been weirdly satisfying. It must’ve been immensely painful, yet Knox hadn’t made a move. He’d just stared at me. Before saying … whatever the heck it was about the bullet.

It must’ve been about the bullet.

He couldn’t possibly have been talking about me. But I couldn’t deny the way he’d watched my face the entire time I’d searched for the bullet, his expression not blank but … riveted. Hungry. Reverent.

“I put an AirTag in every one of your bags and suitcases,” Daisy explained, still sitting at the table, staring at Knox with her delicate brows scrunched together.

“You put tracking devices in my suitcases?” I paused in my work for a moment to take her in. And to settle my stomach. It turned out I was squeamish with gunshot wounds.

But I couldn’t vomit or pass out right then.

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