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“Like hell. I want to go home,” I snap. Anger flares in my chest, and the darkness surrounding my vision thickens. I stagger, struggling to catch my balance, and Azarius grabs my shoulder to keep me upright.
“Devyn,” he says, and his voice sounds distant. “Are you all right?”
“I—” My grip on consciousness is slipping.
“She’s lost a lot of blood,” Elio says, pointing to my injured arm.
I follow his line of sight to my arm, turning it over to get a better look at my injury, and see a trail of blood dancing its way toward my fingertips before dripping to the blackened soil on the ground. The adrenaline coursing through my veins had masked the pain, but as I look now, my skin burns white hot, making me wince.
“It’s not that bad,” I say, but even as the words leave my lips, I know it’s a lie. Seeing the rips in my skin pouring blood makes me weak, and my vision fades to black.
“Devyn!” Azarius’s voice is the last thing I hear before I go under.
ChapterFour
Azarius
Ihaven’t decided yet if Devyn is brave or stupid, but I know two things for certain.
One, even unconscious in my arms and covered in dirt and blood, the sight of her is enough to make my cock twitch with need. If I keep stealing glances at her, I’m going to be walking back to Rafe’s with a raging hard-on, so I keep my gaze focused ahead as much as possible.
Two, the girl has a death wish. And an insane amount of luck.
Stepping through the portal that separates the monster and human realms could have—and should have—killed her. The fact that she’s still breathing is a miracle, and one I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around. Then, she picked a fight with a Malevolent, one of the nastiest monsters this world has to offer.
If Elio and I had been any farther away, we wouldn’t have heard her screams.
I wouldn’t have been able to save her.
The harshness of that reality prickles across my skin, and I shake the thought away. I try to tell myself it’s just because she’s hot as hell, and her dying would be a waste of beauty, but that’s not it. There’s something mesmerizing about her.
No. Magnetizing.
An invisible cord draws me to her, and the harder I resist, the stronger it pulls.
It’s intriguing.
And extremely annoying.
I shouldn’t care if she lives or dies. I shouldn’t be worried about whether Rafe will kill her or let her go. But as we approach his mansion, which is hidden in a secluded area of the twisted woods, fear creeps up my back, and I find it a little harder to breathe. I cradle her body closer to mine unintentionally.
My hopes aren’t high.
Rafe’s a dick, known for being cruel and callous, but that’s what makes him such a threat in the monster world. To rule the monsters, you have the be the biggest and baddest of them all. And that’s him.
“You know he’ll probably tell us to kill her anyway,” Elio says grimly, making my jaw tense.
He walks a few feet away to my right, weaving his way through the trees as stealthily as he can with the wings on his back, but he isn’t very graceful. The trek is normally much easier for me, but with Devyn in my arms, I move with extra caution. The closer we get to the mansion, the closer the trees grow together, making it difficult to get through in some parts.
I turn sideways to maneuver between two trunks, careful to avoid hitting Devyn’s feet.
“Maybe not,” I say through clenched teeth.
There’s hardly enough room for us to squeeze through the foliage now, so I know we’re close to Rafe’s place. Considering most of the Malevolent monsters are huge, lurking fuckers, they don’t bother trekking this far into the woods. In all my years of working for Rafe, I’ve never seen a Malev make it through to the mansion.
It’s possible they’re too dumb to figure out where he lives, but my guess is it’s not worth the hassle. They’d have to bring an army to take Rafe down, and most Malevs are solitary creatures. They wind up eating one another if they’re stuck together for too long.
We finally emerge into the clearing where the mansion sits in a pool of green light cast from the moon overhead. It’s one of the largest constructs I’ve seen in the monster realm, aside from a castle past the mountains in the West, and it’s by far the most ornately detailed.
