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“I never know when you’re lying to me,” she gasped out between wrenching sobs that burst from her chest out of nowhere.
“I have never lied to you.” Rey was affronted by the very idea. So much so, he rushed her. Stooping to grab her around the thighs, he hauled Devin up so their eyes were level. “Whatever else you believe about me, you need to understand that. I will never lie to you, Devin.”
There it was. The warm blanket of safety wrapping tight around her, easing the tension from her shoulders until Devin’s cheek met his shoulder. Nose tucked tight against his neck, she breathed in his scent by the desperate lungful. It eased the tight knot in her stomach, tension washing away with every breath until she melted against him. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right, but she wound her arms tight around him and gave a quiet hum swollen with unshed tears.
“Just for a little while,” Rey said through a purr, shoving away even the thought of fear on the driving edge of that subterranean rumble. He was already entering the bedroom, movements stiff despite Devin’s quiet murmurs to put her down, not to hurt himself as he walked on his knees to the center of the bed.
He was staining the pale blue sheets with blood and grime, but Devin didn’t care as she wrapped her limbs tighter around him. She wasn’t tired enough to sleep, but she dutifully closed her eyes and rested her cheek against the steady thunder emanating from his chest. It didn’t seem to take long at all for his breaths to slow and even out.
Careful not to wake him, Devin twisted around, sliding up to lean against the headboard. Cradling the back of his head, she brought him down against her. He nuzzled the space between her breasts with a low sound of pleasure before resting his head against her stomach. Devin ran her fingers through his hair, restoring order to the mussed strands before ruffling them with measured passes.
Devin decided she’d wake him in an hour. He’d give her that much. In the meantime, she lost herself in thought and allowed herself to enjoy this moment. So picture perfect it ached, she hummed low in her throat and caressed the man who she couldn’t understand her reaction to.
Chapter Seven
It took much longer than the handful of hours Rey told her it would to sort out what happened at the club. Over a week went by, his temper fraying with each passing day until Rey was a live wire of destructive promise. The slightest look, the wrong word spoken, and he flew into a rage.
At first Devin blamed the pain, something no Alpha was good at suffering. Any perceived weakness rankled their fragile egos. She might have teased him about it, but a single glance at the endless depths of his chestnut gaze was enough to quiet any humor.
If Rey was a wave of destruction, Devin stood closest to its path.
It wasn’t that she feared he would hurt her, not really. Though his hands became rough all too soon as he climbed on top of her in the small hours of the night, violent in the middle of his passions, he hadn’t left more than the print of his fingers and the red ring of his teeth at her breast. Not so much for her to dread it. At least, not yet.
He was cold, aloof in the scarce moments they spent together away from the bed during those handfuls of days. A haunting reminder of the devastating time before Beau tried to sell her. Enough so that a constant generalized anxiety coursed through her veins, worked to a frenzy at the slightest provocation. Threats lingered in every shadow, panic simmering under her skin, waiting to be unleashed. She jumped at the smallest sounds, diving into Rey’s arms for the safety he held at arm’s length. Everything made her upset, which only served for Rey to become colder.
No one would explain what was going on and why Rey was somehow responsible for it. Caught in her personal turmoil, unable to distract herself with Rey’s warm security, she hid in the bed more often than not. A last refuge of safety where his scent was strong and clean, unfettered with the smoky darkness that hung over him now. She stopped cooking, didn’t bother to clean up the mess of takeout containers and coffee cups scattered through the apartment. Rey didn’t say a word about it.
Sleeping for hours at a stretch, languishing in the cold sheets when she pried her eyes open, Devin could admit only to herself the feeling of being bereft. Abandoned with such careless ease as he pored over maps and scrawled notes, shouting at subordinates when they returned with no new information.
Well into the second week, Devin began to have an inkling that something was wrong. Her body ached. Limbs so weighted that even shuffling to the bathroom was an impossible feat. Head so filled with swampy muck that true thought evaded her at every turn.
Time slipped by in immeasurable increments, Rey’s visits becoming sparser with the passage of her waking moments. He no longer woke her every night, sometimes never entering the bedroom for more than a change of clothing and a quick shower.
Adrift in a sea of murky confusion, she stumbled out into the living room to find him at the island with several men she didn’t recognize, Beau standing to one side as he pointed out areas on a map.
As one their attention swung towards her. A pack of predators sizing up the prey who stood hovering in the doorway. Nostrils flaring, they scented the air, even Beau tipping his head back to take a deep breath. Devin swayed forward, inhaling through her nose. The chaos of sights and smells mangling her thoughts, pounding away her reason for emerging in the first place as it all slammed around the inside of her skull.
“I don’t feel so good,” she mumbled to no one in particular as the thought broke free from the slimy mire just before her knees folded, sending her crashing to the ground. Darkness swallowed up her vision, though true unconsciousness skittered away from her.
Aware enough to feel hands grabbing her, to hear the snarls and barked orders, she couldn’t make sense of any of it. Devin knew she was back in the bed, but only from the stale scent of her miserable loneliness saturating every inch of it. Curling up on her side, she buried her whine deep in the pillow. Muffling her pain as something hot and evil scoured through her middle.
“Shh, sweetheart,” Rey said through a comforting purr. The mattress dipped under his weight, his hand a scalding brand down her frozen side.
“It shouldn’t be happening so soon.” Beau’s voice was a whisper, bizarre in and of itself, but the thickness of the deep timbre swirled around her. Adding to the confusion, clawing fingers over screaming nerves.
“Can you get more?” Rey slid further onto the bed, curling his body around Devin’s as she wailed into the suffocating softness.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t exactly easy. In time? Definitely not.”
Skin too tight, constricting her every breath, it twisted over bone until Devin writhed to ease the pain. Spine tangled in agony, she arched and turned to ease the jagged hooks ripping delicate vertebrae apart.
“Fuck,” Rey rasped against Devin’s neck, dragging her arms to her sides as she tried to claw at the prickling flesh of her arms and legs.
“You can’t stay with her,” Beau murmured, ignoring Rey’s violent snarl as he settled his weight at the foot of the bed. “Once was dangerous enough.”
Devin lost the fraying thread of their conversation. Plunged into molten liquid, it burned her from the inside out. Sizzling through her veins with a slithering hiss, laying waste to the very idea of thought. She was nothing but sensation and response. Her every stuttering inhalation scorching, the slide of soft sheets sandpaper rough. Devin writhed in the inferno, suffocating under the implacable weight of fire.
Joints screaming, he pried her open. Limbs dragged around the impressive breadth of a mountain that tried to destroy her with the intensity of its heat. Devin’s eyes rolled under the earth-shattering thunder ripping her apart. It slammed against her, slick folds parting with wanton eagerness. Clenching around the throbbing length as he withdrew with an agonizing slowness just to do it again.
