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The cupboard door buckled beneath my fist as I punched it, the pain bringing a moment of sweet relief from the agony inside my head. Whatever had gone down after I’d left, or maybe had gone down because of us fucking, had left Harriet barely saying a word to me. She'd gone out on whatever fucked-up mission she'd chosen without me. For the first time since we'd killed the fucked who owned her, she'd left me.
All because of Alfie.
If it weren't for him being a twisted little fuck, we would never have crossed that threshold. Being intimate with her had been a fantasy of mine for years, but not like that. Not in a way that would tear us apart rather than bring us together.
My knuckles cracked when I balled my hand up, bruises already forming from my violence towards the door. I threw myself down on my bed and closed my eyes. Alfie's pitiful cries broke through. Reaching over to the display system, I punched my finger against the volume control, silencing him. The video feed had plagued me as I watched him dip lower and lower because, despite my anger, I was beginning to think he wasn't the devil Harriet had painted him to be. I didn't doubt that he'd hurt her and that he deserved to pay for that, but the other stuff with his dad? What if he really didn't know anything about it?
It made me sick every time I thought about it. I wanted to protect Harriet, even after everything. It was my duty to protect her. But torturing Alfie didn't feel like it had done with any of the other men we'd destroyed. We'd always had solid evidence of their deeds prior to hurting them. I couldn't discount the pain Alfie had caused her, but he was also forced into the act from what she'd told me. He'd paid for it.
The rest of it was beginning to feel like cruelty for cruelty's sake.
Harriet was in the kitchen area making a cup of tea when I ventured in.
Tension lay thick in the air between us, making me want to retreat. I leaned against the counter and swallowed. ‘How’d it go?’
‘Another killer removed from the world.’
‘Were you careful?’
Harriet narrowed her eyes as she turned, resting back against the fridge and blowing on her steaming mug. ‘Aren’t I always?’
‘No.’
A twisted smile curved her lips, one that had never been turned my way before. A smile usually reserved for men she wanted to hurt. A shiver snaked up my spine, and I stood straighter.
‘Are we going to talk about what happened?’ I asked, wanting everything to just go back to the way it had been. Pre-Alfie.
‘You fucked me, Petros. You bent me over and filled me with your cum. What’s there to discuss? We weren’t making love. Did it not satisfy you?’ A thousand sirens sounded inside my skull. Her eyes flashed with a promise of danger. ‘Or did it make you sad to see me drip it into Alfie’s mouth? Because that’s the reason we were fucking, wasn’t it? To torture him.’
I wanted to grab her and tell her that it was more than that. That I had craved her since the day I first laid my eyes on her. Through all the pain and angst, it had always been for her.
‘He’s ruining everything,’ I said, failing to hide the pain in the words, holding my position as she moved towards me, her hot tea sloshing over her fingers. She didn’t even flinch. ‘I should just go in there and put him out of his misery.’
‘It’d be the last thing you do.’ Her words were as sharp as her blade, cutting me with their venom-soaked edges. For the first time, I saw her as Alfie did, saw beyond the glinting amber pools in her eyes to the dark soul that lay curved like her viper namesake. He was right, there was a side of her that I wouldn’t be able to feed. No matter how much I worshipped her. She needed something that wasn’t me. The realisation filled my veins with burning ice.
I love her.
When I was taken from my family and forced into her owner’s service, I believed that working hard and following orders would keep my family safe. It hadn’t. He’d taken me to pay their debts and killed them anyway. I’d seen my pain reflected in the beautiful, tortured twenty-five-year-old Harriet when I was just seventeen. I had disobeyed my owner for the first time to clean her wounds and wrap her in my arms. My service had been spent making it my mission to save her one day. The day that we killed the dickhead, I had found my family in her. For years, she’d been the sole focus of my attention. The light that kept me burning.
She had always been enough for me, but I’d failed to see that I wasn’t enough for her.
What a monumental fucking idiot.
‘I need this,’ she said after a few minutes of silence stretching between us. Worst of all, I knew it was true. She needed to track down the men who hurt her and make them pay. I no longer believed that it would end there though. Could I spend the rest of my life following her around like a wounded dog, begging for scraps of her attention?
‘I know. After this, I’m done.’ Was it pain or anger that shone in her eyes at my words?
‘So be it.’
Alfie looked pale and lost as I approached the cage. Guilt ripped at my innards. He may have been our captive, but in our anger, we’d mostly left him without having even his basic needs met.Food, water, soap, company. Even we’d been afforded that.
He didn’t move when I opened the cage and the worry that he was dead sank into me. Only when I saw the slow rise of his chest, did I let myself breathe. A soft groan was all that met me as I detached his leg shackles and unclipped his hands from the bars, keeping his wrists cuffed together. Lifting him was too easy. His once-pronounced muscles were looking sinewy and waxy in the low light, and concern flooded me. I shouldn’t have cared, but the sassy fuck had grown on me despite my anger at Harriet’s attention towards him. With my arms beginning to strain, I made my way to my room, not caring if Harriet saw me.
The kitchen and sitting room area were empty, so I pushed my way into my room and placed Alfie down on my bed. Leaning over him, I pinched his chin between my fingers and spoke into his ear.
‘I swear if you cause me any grief, I’ll throw you back in that cage and leave you there. Don’t try anything stupid.’
‘Okay,’ he said in a throttled whisper, his throat rasping.
