A swift punch to the face snapped my head back. I’d been distracted, and fucking Draven finally got in a shot. Now, the motherfucker grinned up at me, blood staining his teeth and spilling down his chest.
Through the telepathic bond that connected us, he taunted,Your little witch is even hotter when she’s bleeding.
Wonder what she sounds like when she screams,Marco chimed in. I turned to see him and the other bastard circling Haley’s shield, waiting for a break.
Waiting forherto break.
“Guess we’ll know soon enough, eh?” Draven again, this time speaking the words out loud, his eyes filling with lust. “I can’t wait to stuff that tight little ass full of my—”
I don’t know if he ever finished that thought. Don’t know if he said the final word and I just didn’t hear it.
All I knew was now I had him pinned to the ground, groaning and writhing under my weight like a little bitch, one of my hands wrapped around his throat, the other tearing out the wet, bloody meat that used to be his tongue.
The sound he made… Goddamn.
I leaned in close, grinning ear to ear as I inhaled the scent of his blood. “Guess we know what it sounds like whenyouscream, Draven. And fucking hell, it’s enough to drive a man insane.”
I shoved the loose tongue right back into his mouth, choking him with it.
Haley’s magick was fading behind me, Marco and Keradoc’s other gargoyle looming closer, their filthy, vile thoughts invading my mind. They didn’t seem to care that I was slice-and-dicing their pal.
They only cared that—in a matter of minutes—they’d have their hands on my girl.
Channeling a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I slashed open Draven’s face, tearing the thick hide right off the bone. I rose to my full height, dragging his mutilated body up with me, then slamming him right down onto his knees. With a swift kick to the back, I sent him sprawling face-first into the dirt.
Haley gasped, her magick finally sputtering out, Marco’s evil taunts echoing through my skull.
She’s going to choke on my cock…
Pure, white-hot fury boiled up from deep inside me, a violent nuclear explosion that could only be quenched with one final, desperate move.
It was a thing unheard of among the gargoyles—an act so foul, so profane, we didn’t even commit it against our worst enemies.
Doing it would mean turning my back on the last of my kin, on all the ancestors that had lived and died before me. It meant tarnishing my name in this life and the next. It meant severing all ties with everything I’d ever known.
It meant I could no longer claim the status of protector. Of guardian.
It meant I couldn’t even call myself a gargoyle anymore.
But what the fuck kind of protector and guardian would I be—what kind of gargoyle—if I let my bonded mate come to harm?
No. I was beyond honoring some ancient bullshit creed.
I was here. Now. And I would protect the woman I loved with everything I had—with everything I was.
Draven lay twitching before me, face down in the dirt.
Without another thought, I pounced on him.
And with trembling hands, I gripped his wings—the one thing more than any other that made him who he was—and ripped them from his back.
Blood sprayed from the wounds, and Draven cried out once more in agony, knowing that whether he lived or died in this moment, his life was over either way.
But he wasn’t going to live. No fucking way.
The other two gargoyles finally fell silent, their shock reverberating through me like an electrical current. It was one thing for them to stand by and let their man get his ass whooped. Killed, even, if they were in the mood for a little bloodshed. It’s not like mercs had any true loyalty to one another.
But this?
