Page 32 of Devil Mine

Before I can go further, a hand grabs my shoulder and yanks me backwards. I was so absorbed by her that I didn’t even feel the person creeping up on us. She dulls my senses, murdering my honed survival skills with just one look. She’s fucking dangerous.

And I’m fucking furious we’ve been interrupted.

“Get your hands off Miss Noble,” a voice grunts at me.

My back is to my attacker so I can’t see him. Whoever he is, he’s a dead man. His forearm comes against my throat as his other hand holds a knife and swings it straight down towards my face.

Amateur.

I duck under his arm and twist it behind his back, holding him prone. It’s a fifth security guard. I should have known to account for him, that there’d be one assigned to this floor like every other, but I saw Tess and I forgot everything else.

He’s younger than the others, the poor idiot. They probably put him up here because they thought the risk to him would be minimal. It’s too bad he has to die, his parents will probably miss him.

I elbow him in the face and take advantage of the fact that I’ve stunned him to grab his other hand and redirect it towards him. I use his hand to plunge his own knife swiftly into his throat.

His blood sprays out of the punctured artery and splashes across my face. There’s something satisfying about its warmth. It was pumping dutifully through his veins before he decided to make an enemy of me. Now it’s not.

Tess screams in the background.

The guard’s eyes are wide and startled, staring uncomprehendingly up at me, his hands grasping at the air as he slowly begins to fall. It all happened so fast his brain didn’t have time to register that he’d moved from attacker to attacked before the knife was embedded in his throat.

He’s dead before he hits the floor.

???

Chapter Twelve

Tess

Agaping pit of fear opens in my stomach when I watch the security guard fall to the ground, lifeless. I don’t know his name, don’t know anything about him except that he died protecting me.

I’m petrified as I look up at Thiago. He’s covered in his blood, reveling in it. It’s dripping from his forehead, down his eyelids and onto his lips. He steps over the guard’s body with deranged nonchalance like the man is nothing more than trash that he doesn’t want soiling his shoes, and comes to me. He presses me into the corner with no escape and his arms come down on either side of me, caging me in.

I never thought there’d come a time where I’d yearn for the boredom I felt a month ago.

“I’ll kill anyone that gets between you and me,amor. Take that as my first wedding vow,” Thiago says with a grim, evil smile. “Now where were we?”

My throat is closed, constricted. I can’t make any words come out no matter how hard I try. All I can do is watch as lust rolls through his gaze once more, thick and blinding, and then he bends his head and shoves it back into the crook of my neck, going back to his carnal attack like he didn’t just slaughter another man in front of me.

I jump when his lips close around the skin on the side of my throat. He suctions it into his mouth, his tongue laving feverishly at it. I’m no longer in control of my own body. I have no idea what’s happening. I’m staring into the dead man's eyes as Thiago sucks at my throat like an animal. I should be horrified. Nauseated.

I am.

I am.

But my body is a riot of emotions and none of them have anything to do with disgust.

“You…you…” I say, searching desperately for a complete sentence. For the first time in my life, my body masters my mind. I feel shut out of all rational thoughts and who am I without those?

His hand comes up to cup the other side of my face, then slides into my hair. He grips it and pulls my head to one side, giving him better access to my neck. He runs his nose up the expanse of my throat.

“Yes, yes, I’m a murderer and you hate me, we’ve already been over this,” Thiago rasps gutturally against my ear. “But here’s something new. Apparently, death makes you wet.”

The rumble in his voice tells me how turned on he is by this new discovery.

“That’s not true,” I pant. My voice pitches up when his hand slides underneath my sweater and makes contact with the skin of my stomach. “Oh.”

His palm slides up the plane of my abdomen. The contact is barely a graze and I feel so sensitive, fragile almost, because of it. He curls a hand around my waist, fingers digging into my skin, possessive and greedy, adding pressure to his touch that I didn’t know I needed and pulling me closer against him. He’s stroking me exactly where Franklin hurt me, erasing bad memories with what should be worse memories but is just pure, primal arousal instead.

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