Page 15 of The Wraith & Her Killer

“What. Did. I. Tell. You.”

She tries to look away, but I grip her neck and use my thumb beneath her jaw to hold her in place. “That it belongs to you.”

“Thatwhatbelongs to me?”

“My heart. Everything. All of me.”

I nod. “And then you left me,” I spit, dropping my hand. I leave the bathroom with her following hesitantly behind me as I make my way through the house until I get to the guest room Rune set up for me.

I know what she said earlier, but I’m goading her to repeat herself. She stands in the doorway of the room before quietly closing the door behind her.That’s… brave.What she knows of me is that I’m a fucking killer who will take whatever the fuck I see fit from her, uncaring of the necessary steps to get there. And yet, she just shut herself in here with me.

She’s quiet for several moments before she repeats her words from earlier. “I-I didn’t want to leave you, Adris.”

“You say that, yet you did it anyway.”

Facts, Adris. Get the fucking facts and quit fucking pussyfooting around them with immature banter.

I sit on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh and beckon her toward me. Reluctantly, she listens and stops just shy of my reach. I allow it. For now.

“What happened,Wraith?”

“It was my mother,” she supplies, but I already knew this. Mikhail Kuznetsov was furious and beside himself for years after Odessa and her mother disappeared. Odessa was the bastard child but the sole heir to the Kuznetsov bratva. He’s been searching for her for all these years, but it’s something else that plagues the Pakhan besides his secret daughter’s disappearance.

“Why did she take you and run?”

“Why is the fucking sky blue, Adris? That world is dangerous and my mother was tired of living in fear. She loved Papa, but she loved me enough to leave him and try and give me a shot at a normal life.”

“Doesn’t look like she did much better.” I gesture to her bruises and her eyes instantly well with those pesky-ass tears.

“That’s because we never made it,” she snaps at me, her chin quivering. “Mama was killed before we even made it an hour outside of city limits. An enemy of Papa ran us off the road, then shot my mother point-blank.”

Thatis new. According to my father, they turned the city upside down looking for them and had never mentioned anything of the sort. As if the evidence of her mother’s death—of her and Odessa’s entire existence—had been scrubbed. Wherever she’s been over the last decade, it wasn’t paradise, that’s for fucking sure.

I look at the woman before me, needing more answers from her before I go completely off the rails and start another killing spree. “And what about you? What happened to you after she was killed?”

She swallows thickly, shifting her stance from foot to foot. Tears free-fall down her cheeks in heavy rivulets as she whispers, “I was taken from the wreckage and sold.”

The icy blood that already ran through my veins freezes. My body goes rigid and all I see is red. My voice is low and controlled, though I feel anything but. “Sold? By who?Towhom?”

My jaw ticks as I wait for her to answer. Little does she know she’s feeding me my next kill. Knowing I’m this close to sinking my arrows into another mark has me nearly salivating with feral excitement.

She takes a hesitant step forward, her brows drawn down. “What are you going to do to him when I tell you?”

I tilt my head at her.When. Not if…I grab her by the hem of her shirt and give a firm tug, effectively yanking her closer. I catch her body as she stumbles over her own feet and settle her to stand between my spread thighs. Her golden skin breaks out in goosebumps when I trail each of my hands up the backs of her thighs.

“You really want to know what I’ll do to the man who bought you? To the people who sold you?” I give her a wicked grin, lookingup at her from beneath my lashes before placing a hot kiss to the space between her breasts, over her shirt.

Her lips roll between her teeth for a contemplative moment, then she nods.

I lean up and bite her left nipple through her shirt, tugging lightly. She gasps and her hands fly to my hair. “You want me to tell you what I’ll do to the man who dared to touch you?” Another nod, and her fingers tug at my strands when I move to tease her other breast. “To hurt what fucking belongs to me?”

“Yes.” Her instant confirmation is nothing more than a breathy gasp.

My grin is so fucking wide that it has skipped manic, and morphs straight into deranged when I grab her hips and flip us around, and toss her onto the bed with a bounce. I’m on her before she can brush her wild, pastel hair from her eyes.

I do it for her. Of course, not because I’m a gentleman, but because I want her to see the full extent of her monster that will forever fucking haunt her, slaying all other demons and monsters who even think about breathing the same air as her.

I pin her hands above her head before licking a slow line up the column of her neck. “When I find him, I think I might tie him up with some rusty barbed wire. Let him hang just far enough off the ground that he can’t find any relief.”

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