Page 56 of Purchased

“Yeah! Kill him!”

Beatrix pops up behind us, having apparently been listening in. She heard me getting heated. She felt my energy shift. She caught me just before I got to the verge of… I sigh inwardly. I have to manage myself better, or I will never manage her.

“I’m not going to kill him, Beatrix.” I turn to her, where she is smiling hopefully, her long, dark hair flowing in the breeze. She is beautiful when she is vengeful.

“You’re not?” She pouts. “Why not?”

“He’s annoying, not deserving of murder.”

“Well, I can’t kill him by myself. He’s too big.”

“Beatrix, go and do something else. Anything else.”

She smirks and turns away, causing me to rethink my instructions immediately. “Wait! Notanythingelse. Everybody needs to remain unscathed.”

I turn back to Mr. Volkov once she is gone, unsettled with half my mind now wondering what she is doing.

“As you were saying.”

“Yes. As I was saying. You two are a good match,” he says.

“Oh, you think so?”

Is he trying to suck up to me now? Some kind of psychological head game?

“The pair of you have one thing in common with each other. You both like to lie to yourselves about what you are feeling. You’re furious. She’s hurt.”

“I’m not furious.”

“You ooze with repressed fury,Maître.”

“I do not.”

“Of course you do. That is why you have done very little to restrain your mate. Why you delight in her viciousness. She is what you wish you could be. She’s more free than you are.”

“I have no interest in controlling my mate, because I want her free to love me. I have seen males who control their mates in ways that crush their spirits. I want to bring hers out of her, not be another person in her life she has to hide from.”

He looks at me keenly, and I am sure what he considers to be perceptively. “Are you hiding?”

Oh, fuck off.

I turn on my heel without saying those three little words that are absolutely pounding in my brain, and I leave.

I,maître, alpha of the pack, abandon my balcony because the man on it makes me think things I do not want to think and feel things I do not want to feel.

She’s right, he is an asshole.

“Are you sure we can’t kill him?”

Trixie slides out of the shadows in the hall as I pass. She hadn’t gone far. The likely interpretation is that she was spying on us, but I get the feeling she was keeping an eye out for me. I think we both feel a certain kind of threat from Mr. Volkov.

“We could, but we’re not going to,” I say, taking her hand in mine. “Come with me. We’re getting out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“The garage.”

It feels like we’re escaping the chateau as we slide into my sports car and gun the six-cylinder motor in all its old world, dinosaur sputtering charm. I push the pedal to the floor and the acceleration throws us back in our seats as we race down the driveway.

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