“Here,” Lauren says, draping Sinclair’s suit jacket over my shoulders and helping me button it to hide my breasts from view.
I lift my head to see Beaumont held up by Sinclair and Elijah. Darian inspects his bloody knuckles with morbid curiosity before punching him so hard, a tooth flies from his mouth. “You thought you could touch what’s mine?”
I flinch at the putrid hate in his voice, the dark undertone of deadly violence.
He steps up close, baring his teeth in a snarl. “You thought wrong. Putting your hands on my wife was a big mistake.”
Beaumont stares defiantly at my husband, who studies him from head to toe like he’s a specimen in a lab experiment.
“I can’t wait to skin you alive.”
“Fuck you,” Beaumont hisses, earning him a punch in the gut.
When he finally stops coughing, he lifts his head and flashes a bloodied, condescending smile. “You think your wife is loyal to you, Delacroix? Open your fucking eyes. She’s chomping at the teeth to stab you in the back.”
My husband’s fist flies, and a hard crack rings out in the evening air. Blood squirts from Beaumont’s broken nose, pouring down his lips and chin. He wiggles his jaw like a psychopath begging for another round. “Do you think the Bishop will look at you twice when the truth comes out? You’re weak, Delacroix. Fucking weak?—”
“Shut your filthy mouth!” Sinclair growls.
Beaumont never takes his eyes off my husband. “There’s no room for your kind of weakness in the Exodus.”
“Sir,” a burly Pawn says as he and another Pawn enter the balcony with a cigar trimmer. “Here’s the item you requested.”
Darian accepts it without glancing at me, focused on my attacker, and a struggle breaks out as one of the Pawns forcefully inserts Beaumont’s middle finger into the trimmer. Sinclair and Elijah grunt as they buckle down to keep him in place.
Held down by two men, Beaumont can’t break free, but he still fights and struggles, wasting his energy as he desperately cries for help.
My husband jerks his chin in silent command, and the other Pawn steps up behind Beaumont and chokes him with his arm around his neck, effectively putting a sudden stop to his screaming.
“You don’t want to watch this,” Lauren says beside me.
She’s wrong. I do want to watch.
I can’t take my eyes off my husband and the darkness that pours from him in uncontrolled waves. He’s magnetic and utterly mesmerizing in his lethality.
“What made you think you could touch my wife?”
Turning red from the brutal chokehold on his neck, Beaumont looks over at me, but Darian blocks his view and says, “Don’t you fucking dare look at her.”
I hear Beaumont, hidden behind my husband, spit on his tux.
“Answer the question,” Darian says in an eerily controlled voice. “What made you think you could touch my wife?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
My husband sighs, disappointed, nudging his chin for the Pawn to step away and let him take the cigar trimmer. Beaumont breathes hard, cursing and wrestling against Sinclair and Elijah, and the latter smirks at me as hoarse, blood-curdling screams send sleeping birds flying from a nearby tree.
I taste sick at the back of my throat but refuse to look away from the dark sadism in Elijah’s cold gaze.
“You thought you could put your filthy fingers inside my wife.” Darian turns around, his hands bloodied. “It’s only fitting she gets to keep them as a souvenir and a reminder of the consequences of betrayal.” Standing before me like an apparition of Lucifer, he holds out my attacker’s severed fingers, but I can’t move past his words.
“You think I betrayed you?” I ask, flicking my eyes between his.
Darian’s gaze burns into me, void of emotion, before he tosses the fingers onto my lap and walks some distance away to toe two items on the ground with his shiny Oxfords. Crouching down, he picks them up and inspects the inverted cross necklace in the dim light streaming through the balcony doors. The same necklace the stranger thrust into my hand back in the main hall. “I have to give it to you,wife.You’re good.” He closes his fistaround the cross and looks over at me. “How many times did you evade my security? How did you communicate with the rebels?”
Evade his security? What is he talking about? I never…
My heart cracks in two, an ache pressing on my chest as I search for the right words, but what can I possibly say to make things right and bring the warmth back to his eyes? The way he looks at me now… It hurts.
