Page 5 of Tempted to Rebel

Judging from his silence, it doesn’t look like I’ll be receiving any firm caresses or growled orders for me to come anytime soon.

Not that I want them anymore.

I close my eyes and hug my knees to my chest, wishing this would all be over. The worst part of all isn’t actually the cold or the cage—it’s knowing that despite what Fox and Angel told me the night we met, I’m powerless to fight back.

Chapter 2

Rebel

Eventually,every part of my body goes numb. The fizzy tingle in my arms fades. The burn in my throat disappears. The throbbing ache in my chest—the one Celia fucking put there when sheleft—finally lets up, and I can breathe for the first time in days.

It’s when I roll over onto my stomach and peer out the open doorway to see her curled into a ball and covered in blankets that everything comes rushing back.

The hurt.

The anger.

The sorrow.

Thepain.

But the alcohol has done its job—every feeling fizzles out one agonizing second later, and I drop the empty glass bottle to the floor. Celia flinches, letting me know that she’s awake. My music stopped playing an hour ago when my playlist ran dry, and we’ve been sitting in silence ever since. Ruin ran off to his dungeon upstairs—is it still a dungeon if it’s on the third floor?—and left me to babysit.

Two weeks ago, I would have jumped at the chance to spend all day alone with Celia. Just the two of us with every flicker ofdesire my brothers have been stoking inside of her, all ready and waiting for me to ignite.

I would have fucked her hard. Soft. Gently. Rough. Flipped her over the side of the couch and bucked my hips into hers, or backed her against the wall and wrapped those perfect thighs around my hips to punch up inside of her, or laid her down gently on my bed and carved a place for myself so deep that she could never get rid of me.

Because that’s exactly what she did when she ran away—she threw me out like a boyfriend she didn’t want or need anymore.

Boyfriend.I scoff, rubbing the back of my eyelids. Yeah, right, like we were ever boyfriend-girlfriend. I scowl at the memory of how it felt to consider such a thing—that fluttery excitement when she’d text me back, or the anticipation of seeing her once she got off work and made it home.

How fuckingstupid.

I’m twenty-eight years old, and somehow, she makes me feel like I’m a teenager all over again, horny as shit and craving whatever scraps of attention she’ll give me. I scratch my chest and the wad of keys around my neck clink together, the metal warm on my skin. Yeah, I took her stuff, so what? How did she think I was getting into her house every day? And that second house, the one she kept a secret from us so that she could disappear once she decided she wasn’t having fun anymore?—

I scowl harder. Thanatos sent us the body cam footage from when he picked her up. The house itself was deteriorating, like it hadn’t been maintained in years, and Celia… she actually looked frightened when he burst through the front door.

Of what, Thanatos being rough with her, or of coming home to us?

The former, I can understand, but the latter pisses me off.

What the fuck does she have to be scared of?

I think back to when Rage finally arrived at Celia’s house after the break-in. He walked into her bedroom completely put-together, but the moment he noticed that little purple box torn open on her bathroom counter, he lost his shit.

“Do you know what the fuck this is?”He tosses the box to the floor and stomps on it, his jaw clenched tightly shut.

I hadn’t bothered dissecting her belongings today, so I wait to pick up the empty box until he starts pacing her bedroom. Turning it over in my hands, I decipher the torn logo.

It’s a fucking morning-after pill.

Jealousy courses through me hotter than hell itself, but then relief immediately settles in. If she and Rage have finally had sex, that means that it’s on the table for the rest of us.

Then reality hits and I’m crumpling the box in my fist.

She doesn’t deserve anything from me until I get a goddamned apology, and even then, I might throw her rejection right back in her beautiful fucking face. Everything feels gnarled and twisted inside my chest, the knife in my back cutting deeper than I realized.

My brother feels the betrayal, too, maybe even harder than me. Once Rage figures out how to speak again, he snarls a half-sentence, “like I’m going to fucking let her.”

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