Page 67 of Heart Sick Hate

And it doesn’t have to be a good one. I’d like to see him do anything so I can justify the sick rage desperate to get out.

Toying with the ring dangling around my neck, I watch the two of them. Echo wants me angry, so she’s standing close. But every time the biker leans in, she recoils.

Because she’s mine.

“Well, now you’re free.” Mandi steps in closer, and I get a hit of her too-strong perfume. “Want to go somewhere a little quieter and talk?”

Maybe if she’d asked me a year ago, I’d have been dumb enough to take her up on it. Now, I can barely hear what she’s asking me because Echo Slater’s brushing her hair off one shoulder and stealing all my attention.

“Not tonight.” Not ever.

Echo rolls her shoulders back, standing up taller as her eyes once more flick in my direction. Her gaze moves between me and Mandi, then to the ring spinning between my fingers. She’s trying to appear strong, but her endless eyes show me all her cards with one blink.

“If you like that girl, she can join us.” Mandi lifts onto her toes and gets really close. “I wouldn’t mind.”

She smiles, and for the briefest moment, my attention is drawn back to her. How desperate she is and how the old me might have fallen for that shit, but now it’s just fucking sad. I don’t want Mandi, and her perfume that makes me want to hurl.

I want golden eyes that sparkle when I look back up at them.

The biker talking to Echo grabs her chin to steal her attention, and that’s it. My excuse. My reason.

My world.

Brushing past Mandi, I don’t let her red claws stop me. I shove through the crowd and ignore anything I’ve denied up to this point.

The biker wraps an arm around Echo’s waist, and like the feisty girl she is, she shoves him off her, flipping him off and taking a step back. Echo can hold her own. She was forced to the way she was raised. But it doesn’tmatter because I’m going to do something about this rage that’s been buried for too long.

Echo might tell herself what we did was a means to an end but fuck that shit.

This Goldilocks with her Cruella De Ville hair is my darkness. My light. My other half. And the only one who has ever made me feel weak, whether she sees it or not.

Biker dude brushes her jaw with his hand like she belongs to him, and she swats it away, taking another step back.

I’ve seen this before, and any other night I’d watch with amusement as Echo would kick him in the balls and tell him to fuck off. But that was then. Now she’s mine, and he dared to fucking touch her.

He made the mistake of waking up the beast that lives in my dark, sadistic soul.

When I finally reach them, I shove the biker back.

“Crew.” Echo tries to warn me, but there’s no stopping this.

After all, she’s the one who does this to me.

“Hey, man.” The guy pushes his dark hair back and straightens his cut. “We were having a little chat. Go find your own bitch to fuck.”

The room might as well go silent.

Rage is my element. It’s who I am, and where I belong. It’s the only emotion I’ve ever understood, so I embrace it.

And as Echo tenses at what this guy just said abouther, it fuels me.

Nothing feels better than inflicting pain, and I’ll snap every bone in his body to write her a love song with the sound of his screams.

I grab the biker by the throat and hit him over the side of the head with my beer bottle, leaving a gash in his forehead, even if the force alone isn’t enough to break it. So I smash the bottle on the bar top behind him instead, making jagged edges of one end.

People around us step back and start cheering. And off in the distance, I spot a couple of Twisted Kings making their way through the group to get to us.

Lucky for me, this asshole isn’t a Twisted King, or they’d probably slit my throat for what I’m about to do. Even that wouldn’t be enough to stop me when he had the nerve to call Echo a bitch.

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