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She breaks off. We don’t fucking know what they’re making the girl do, but I can imagine, and clearly, so can she. Riley pushes me away and covers her mouth, tears glistening in her gorgeous brown eyes.
“Madd,” Dante starts, taking a half step forward.
I throw him a hard look, and he takes the hint and shuts the fuck up.
I’m handling this.
He nods, spreading his feet and settling in, arms crossed in front of his chest in a silent signal that he’s got my back. I flick my gaze toward Logan. He’s watching with the kind of chilling intensity that tells me he’s ready for whatever I need from him, just like he has been ever since we became brothers.
Neither one of them pulled a weapon in the club, thank fuck. That shit would have escalated things beyond my control. But goddammit, they were at risk too. She put themandherself at risk because she couldn’t keep her shit together.
It’s unforgivable.
I look back at Riley, my hands clenching into fists as I try to contain the seething anger that’s starting to boil over inside me. A million fucked up scenarios of the people who matter to me most being carried out of Club Prestige in body bags run through my mind, making my stomach clench.
I get why finding her sister like that blindsided her, but it’s no excuse. Excuses are just another thing that gets you dead. How can she not fucking understand that?
“You should be dead,” I grit out.
Fire flashes in her eyes, replacing the agony from the run-in with her sister. “Is that a threat?”
“No, it’s a fucking fact. You almost got killed. You almost got my brothers killed. You need to fuckinglisten when I tell you what to do!”
What started out as a low growl ends in a shout. I’m right up in her face, pressing her against the wall again, and it’s only when I catch the subtlest of movements in my peripheral vision—Logan, shifting his weight when he’s normally capable of an uncanny level of stillness—that I get it together and regain my control.
I drag in a breath and back off, reeling it in as I calm the fuck down and assess the situation.
I scrub a hand over my face, wiping away all expression. She’s still an asset, but shit like this can’t happen again.
I need to teach her a lesson.
“Strip,” I say gruffly.
She hesitates, defying me again.Always so fucking defiant. I thought butterflies were easy to break, but this one doesn’t even bend. She’s part of our world now, though, too deep to easily extricate herself, and she needs to learn that sometimes bending is the only way to survive.
“I told you to fuckingstrip,” I repeat.
“Fine,” she says tightly, her tongue darting out to wet her lips.
My cock twitches as I track the motion in my peripheral vision, but I keep my gaze locked on hers as she reaches for the zipper of her dress.
Her soft, pale skin comes into view as the dress slithers down her body, and my gaze drops immediately to the thin red line on her chest. It’s a healing cut, shallow and perfectly straight, and an unaccountable flare of jealousy rises in me as I realize that I recognize the handiwork.
Logan.
So her clothes weren’t the only thing he used his knife on last night.
I don’t quite know what to do with that information. It’s incredibly out of character for Logan, and it explains how fucking out of sorts he was this morning. But now isn’t the time to deal with that, so I refocus on Riley as she continues to strip.
This time, she’s wearing less than she was the first time I made her do this. Just the dress and her tiny thong, both off in seconds, and a pair of nude heels so tall that we’re almost eye to eye. They’re strappy and sexy as fuck, with little cords or some shit that wrap around her ankles, and when she bends over to undo them…
“Leave them,” I growl, yanking her upright with one hand and sliding my tie off with the other. I loop it around her wrists and use it like a leash to lead her over to the stairs.
For a single moment of pure insanity, I’m tempted to keep going. To take her up to my room, throw her down on my bed, and do what I almost did in my office the other day after she showed me pictures of her life with her sister.
I wanted her in that moment, drawn to the openness and warmth in her eyes. I wanted her so fucking much that I had to shut that shit down. I had to remind usboththat nothing exists between us, so I brought home some random woman and fucked her in the very place where I almost fucked Riley.
I was hoping to get the beautiful, frustratingly fierce butterfly out of my goddamn system. Out of my head. I left the door open knowing there was a chance she would hear us… but I didn’t expect her to walk in. I didn’t expect her to stay and watch, and just seeing the expression on her face, the heat in her eyes… it made me come harder than I have in a long fucking time.
