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Anger overloads my veins, driving me nuts. I need to crash my fists into trees, to snap bones, or to race my bike off a fucking cliff.
Sade stalks closer. He senses when my destructive instincts are taking over, that’s his thing.
“I just want to make one thing clear,” I say, unsheathing my knife and pointing it at Carlton. The mountain man keeps that defiant look on his face, but his focused eyes tell me he’s taking everything I say very seriously. “She. Is. Mine. No matter what you think about her, she is off limits. Got anything to say to her? You come to me first. Got anything to say about her? You swallow it in your fucking mouth.”
“How territorial,” Carlton grumbles. My eyes flash into slits.
“Don’t push your fucking luck.”
I lower the blade, but all my senses remain on alert. I’m strongly aware of my brother’s assessing eyes, and Damon’s dark gaze as he’s making some decision in his head that I hope to fuck doesn’t have anything to do with Eva. I give him a glare that communicates clearly that I am going to kill him if that is the case, King or not.
I turn on my heel and start walking the path toward the property line, but Sade follows, twigs and leaves crunching under his feet. He grabs my shoulder, making me stop. He doesn’t try to turn me around, and he doesn’t sidestep me so we can face each other either. He knows better than that, so he talks over my shoulder.
“You’re willing to start a war for her.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
“You think it’s the same as it was with you and Justine.” I shake my head. “But it’s not.”
“I saw the way you looked at Damon while you talked about her.”
“He’s a great addition to the team, but we don’t know him well enough. He could try to take this matter into his own hands. Besides, we don’t know who he reports to.”
“We do. He reports to Chase. It was Chase who recommended him to the Elders after I took down Dogg Wilson. That’s how he got assigned to us.”
I turn around, coming face to face with my brother. The brutal past that we share shimmers in our eyes, connecting us in ways that no one understands but us. We’re only half-brothers by blood, but we’re related through so much more than that.
“That makes him even more dangerous for Eva. It also makes it more necessary for me to be around her at all times.”
“You’re making up excuses, little brother. You want to be around her.”
When I don’t protest, the man who drives icy dread into war criminals smiles with heart-warming kindness.
“I don’t hear you arguing,” he says.
“Yeah, well, it would be bullshit. And I don’t do bullshit.”
He lets loose a quiet laugh before he pats my shoulder. “Oh, don’t I know that.”
My jaw clenches to keep the words in, but they spill out anyway. “She did confer with Romano behind my back after I told her not to. I threatened her, I punished her, I ravished her. She still talked to him. What if they share a connection I can’t break?”
Sade steps closer. “He was jerking off to her pictures last night, Micah. He clearly wants her, and if we know anything about the filthy fucker, it’s that if he wants something, he’ll stop at nothing to get it. If he didn't get Eva so far, it’s because she resisted him, which means she’s pretty damn badass. You should give her more credit. Whatever her reason to keep in touch with him, we can be sure it’s not of an intimate nature.”
That was my reasoning too after the talk we had last night, but then I had to go ransack her office on campus. I expertly put everything back in place afterwards, the way I’ve done dozens of times after I slipped into a target’s office while on a mission, but last night I was a mad dog. The uncertainty turned me fucking rabid. I punched the boxing bag in my room until it tore from its fucking hinges.
I needed to get as close as possible to her secrets.
I needed to penetrate her.
I needed to be under her very skin.
***
Micah
“JUST THAT NEIGHBOR of hers knocking on her door about a dozen times now but, other than that, all is quiet, boss.” Grime drops Eva’s apartment keys into my hand and kicks his bike into gear. But Beast Mode stays.
