Because Alex was mine. She said the words. She submitted completely. She belonged to me now, and I wasn’t going to let anyone, not Kyllian, not Poseidon, not even Morpheus, take her away from me. But as I watched Kyllian disappear down the second-floor hallway, as I felt the weight of every brother’s eyes on me, as I heard Carver cursing under his breath while he worked on Firestride, I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was about to come crashing down.
The email to Poseidon. Kyllian’s arrival. The confrontation that was about to happen upstairs.
It was all spiraling out of control, and for the first time since I dragged Alex into my world, I wasn’t sure I could keep her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alex
I was still lying in Nano’s bed when I heard it.
The commotion downstairs was muffled at first, just the rumble of raised voices filtering up through the floorboards. But then one voice cut through the rest, sharp and commanding, and even though I couldn’t make out the words, I could hear the authority in it.
Morpheus.
My entire body went rigid.
Oh God. Oh fuck.
The panic hit me like a freight train, sudden and overwhelming. My heart started hammering against my ribs, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps that didn’t seem to bring enough air. I sat up too fast, the room spinning slightly, and grabbed for the sheet to cover myself.
He knows. He knows about the email. He’s coming to kill me.
The thought was irrational. I’d deleted the email, covered my tracks, but rationality had no place in the terror flooding my system. All I could think about was Morpheus’ cold eyes, the way he’d pressed that gun to my temple in the basement, the absolute certainty in his voice when he’d told me I had seventy-two hours.
How long has it been? Have I run out of time?
I couldn’t remember. The last three days had blurred together into a haze of sensation and submission, of Nano’s hands and mouth and cock, of orgasms that had torn me apart and put me back together wrong. Time had stopped meaning anything.
But it meant something to Morpheus.
The voices downstairs grew louder. I heard boots on the stairs, heavy and purposeful, and my panic ratcheted up another notch. My hands were shaking as I clutched the sheet tighter, pulling it up to my chin like it could somehow protect me from what was coming.
Run. You need to run.
But there was nowhere to go. The door was the only exit, and whoever was coming up those stairs was between me and freedom. The window? Three stories up, and even if I survived the fall, I was naked and exhausted, and there were brothers everywhere.
I was trapped.
Just like I’d been trapped since the moment Nano dragged me into that van.
The footsteps were in the hallway now. Getting closer. I could hear them clearly. The steady, measured pace of someone who knew exactly where they were going and wasn’t in any hurry to get there.
Please. Please, not like this.
The door opened.
And it wasn’t Morpheus.
It was a woman.
I stared at her, my mind struggling to process what I was seeing. She was stunning. There was no other word for it. Blonde hair that fell in soft waves past her shoulders, catching the light from the hallway. Green eyes that were sharp and intelligent, taking in the room with a single sweeping glance. She wasprobably in her late twenties or early thirties, dressed in jeans and a fitted leather jacket that looked expensive.
And she was looking directly at me.
Oh fuck.
The shame hit me like a physical blow.
