I prowl the dark hallways of her house, one floor at a time, checking every room and passing four guards stationed at each level of the home along the way. Noble didn’t used to keep so much full-time security at his private residence. He must have hired them after our little talk at his office.
I’m flattered.
They make no move to stop me, all of them seasoned enough to know that would be a losing battle.
I finally track Tess down. She’s not cowering in her bedroom as I expected. In fact, she’s not hiding at all. She’s standing at the end of the hallway on the fifth and final floor, staring out of the porthole window at the pouring rain.
Moving within the shadows, I approach quietly. I know I don’t make a sound but Tess must feel the shift in the air because I see the moment she knows I’m here. Her shoulders tense and her neck straightens.
She whips around, fury and betrayal and heartache stamped on every feature of her face. Her cheeks are dry, no sign of tears in sight. She’s incandescent with rage but fully in control of her emotions.
I hadn’t planned on defiling her until she was officially my wife, but her irate expression is making me question all my carefully laid plans. I want to wipe the sneer off her lips by shoving my dick down her throat. Ending my celibacy by hate fucking my fiancée is exactly what the doctor ordered. I can feel the muscles in my neck loosening just thinking about it.
“Stay away from me,” she hisses. “I meant what I said back there. I won’t marry you and you can’t force me to.”
How little she seems to know about my world.
“Of course I can. And I will. I have no problem dragging you kicking and screaming down the aisle if that’s what it’s going to take. In fact, I might just prefer it. I’ve always liked the fight.”
I prowl closer to her, keeping my movement progressive so she doesn’t see me approach.
This time, her voice does shake.
“Why are you doing this?”
Her lower lip trembles slightly and I find myself wanting to lean forward and bite it.
“I told you; you caught my attention.”
She gapes at me. “So, you force a marriage between us?”
Her eyes track my tongue as it darts out to moisten my lips.
“It was the only way I could have you.”
Tess crosses her arms and tips her chin up at me. “I’d rather throw myself out of this window than marry you.”
“Dramatic,” I quip drolly.
Her eyes flash with anger. “You think this is funny?”
“I think this is wholly unnecessary. You’re wasting your breath and my time throwing a tantrum that I do, in fact, find very amusing. You’re lucky I seem to have developed patience and a sense of humor where you’re concerned, amor, I’m not famously known for having either. But this only ends one way, no matter how much you fight me — with my ring on your finger and you warming my bed.”
Her eyes widen enough that I can see how her pupils dilate. As much as she wants to deny it, her body is far more agreeable to my proposal than her mind is.
“You disgust me.”
“So, you’ve claimed.”
“You have no moral code, no ethics,” she continues, undeterred. “You ruin people’s lives for the fun of it. Your world is nothing but pain and death and you revel in it. I’ve seen it. Seen how you toy with people just because you can.”
I laugh at that, a dark sound that rattles up my throat, and creep even closer. She’s less than a foot away from me now but so angry that she doesn’t notice I have her trapped in a dark corner with no escape.
This close, I can smell her perfume again. It’s intoxicating. The scent is so much moodier than she is with her pink clothes and soft eyes and blonde hair. It’s complicated. Layered. Spicy, like the personality she reveals when she’s around me.
I’ve been watching her. She’s a good girl when I’m not there. Goes to work, does what she’s told, smiles when she’s being belittled. It’s only when she goes toe to toe with me that the spark comes out.
Her attitude intrigues and amuses me, it’s why I let her speak to me the way she does.
I’d have slit the throat of any other long ago.
Her chest heaves with the angry breaths she drags in. I want to bite those lips until they bleed. Maybe I’ll have my last name tattooed on the bottom one since she’s so repelled by the thought of wearing it.
“Get your head out of your SWOT analyses and spreadsheets and into real life, Tess. There’s a very real game of thrones that’s fought in every single city in the world, and I’m a player in it, just as you are. For every white knight, there’s a black one. Where there’s good, there’s evil lurking right beneath the surface. That’s the checks and balances of humanity. That’s how the world works. I’m a facilitator of the Underworld, not its creator. That darkness exists whether I’m involved in it or not, I just happen to master it.”
I reach up and hook a strand of her hair around my finger, still not touching her otherwise. With every passing minute, I’m losing the remaining grip I have on my control.
“I am a criminal, a villain, a monster. The devil. I’m proud of it. It’s who I am, it’s in my blood, it’s a goddamn physical craving that I feed every single fucking day. Power and influence and crushing anyone who’s in my way, those are the only things that matter to me. But now there’s you,” I growl. “And you’re a distraction. I don’t know why, I don’t understand it, but I don’t need to understand it to take you simply because I can. Simply because I want to. So I am. I don’t care what you think of me and I don’t give a fuck how much you fight this, because now you’re mine. Whether you want to be or not. You should be thanking whatever god you believe in that it’s me who wants you – that I’ll do anything to have you – and not anybody else. Or would you prefer I leave you to that pervert who groped you on the dance floor?”
Tess’s eyes ping rapidly between mine, caught off guard by my diatribe. Her head is tilted back to look up at me. I pin her against the wall and bring my face down until mere inches separate it from hers. I note how her breath hitches, how her pulse jumps on the side of her neck. I note how my hands shake with the need for this fix.
“The only thing that separates me from people like your father is that I’m honest about my quest for power at any cost. That’s it,” I tell her, my voice dropping an octave. “You’re being naive if you think your multibillion-dollar company, your perfect house and fancy cars can exist without what I do. The white elites have convinced themselves that they’re the righteous simply because their oppression of people happens via the confines of legitimate business and not out in the open or on the streets. But we’re two sides of the same coin, you and I. One can’t exist without the other.”
Tess puts both palms on my chest to shove me, but she hesitates the moment she touches me. I use that split second to press against her, molding my body to her curves.
“Underneath the pristine exterior of your life, can you really say your world is any different than mine?” I murmur, bending until my face hovers right above the crook of her neck. “Your father beats your mother. He sold you to me to cover his gambling debts. I’d say that his morals and those precious ethics you want to lord over me are just as pitch black as mine. You can see that for the truth that it is or continue to bury your head in the sand, that’s up to you. Like I said, your opinion of me doesn’t weigh in the balance here.”
I curl a finger inside the high neck of her sweater and slowly pull it down and away from her skin. Her heartbeat is racing, galloping dementedly at her throat.
“Now tell me,” I purr, “do you always wear pink?”
It’s irresistible, unstoppable even, the need I have to finally touch her. I’ve waited long enough. It feels like years when it’s only been weeks.
So I finally, finally, lean in and take it.
My tongue moves past my lips and makes contact with the now exposed skin of her collarbone. I groan loudly and she shudders in response, making my hard cock throb.
I yank her collar further down, satisfied when I hear fabric rip. And then I run my tongue from her collarbone and up, slowly and deliciously up, until I find the soft spot behind her ear. I’m assaulted by dangerously unhinged thoughts and cravings of cannibalism as she hits my taste buds with an explosion of flavor. It’s like the experience of having pop rocks for the first time — surprising, confusing, addicting, and it immediately has you going back in for more.
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.
