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Without ceremony, Ava Jade lifted her shoulders and closed the gap between us in eleven long strides, stopping just out of my reach. Her dress was wrinkled, and her wig was slightly askew. She noticed me looking and tugged it off, tossing it on the asphalt as she shook her hair out of the spiral she had it contained in. It swirled around her shoulders in a wild mane of darkest auburn and something in my chest cracked.
Her lips popped open when she noticed the scar on my collarbone. Her eyes narrowed as she followed the line of it down, finding other scars to match it, and different sorts hidden within the ink. I didn’t cover them because I was ashamed, I covered them to avoid this. The look of pity from others. The disgust.
I braced for it, but it didn’t come. Her eyes jerked back up to meet mine and she betrayed no emotion at all except a sort of calm understanding that did things to me I wouldn’t dare speak of.
Ava Jade made a valiant grab for the envelope, but I lifted it out of her reach, catching her wrist with my opposite hand. She had her blade to my throat faster than I could blink. I rolled my hips, soaking in my hunger for her.
“You saw my cards,” I whispered, lowering my head so our faces were only inches apart. “It’s only fair that I see yours.”
Her eyes widened a second before I twisted away from her blade and pulled hard on her wrist, sending her stumbling to catch her footing.
I stuffed the envelope of cash in the front of my shorts, against my slowly building erection. Ava Jade whirled on me, her upper lip curling.
I beckoned her forward with a curl of my fingers.
She rolled my challenge around in her mouth before glancing down at her blade. She gripped it tightly and reeled her arm back for a sniper-like throw. I closed my eyes. Waiting for it to impale somewhere vital, but thethunkof it came and I felt nothing.
When I opened my eyes, her blade was embedded in the pockmarked wood of the streetlamp beam. She attacked while I was turned, and the breath whooshed from my lungs as I went down, my legs swept out from under me. My ribs and temple cracking against the pavement, a ringing forming in my ears.
Damn.
I was up and ready before she could launch her next assault, blocking a throat jab and a knee meant for the family jewels. Ducking from a punch that, if delivered in just the right place, might’ve been my end.
Fucking hell.
She roared her fury as she came at me again and again, and I blocked her, waiting for my opening. She went for a jab at my lower back, and I was too slow to block it. Pain exploded through my abdomen, making me clench my teeth.
When she went in for another hit, misjudging my level of pain, I narrowly dodged it, yanking her arm to get her off balance. She fell, and I was on top of her in a second, using the full force of my body weight to pin her to the pavement.
She struggled, cursing and writhing, trying uselessly to find any opening to get free, but my weight was greater than hers. Her legs were locked down. Her arms pinned. My cock against her belly.
She was trapped.
I saw the moment she realized it, too, her breaths coming faster. Panicked.
No.
Her face went white as a sheet, her body trembling, but it was her eyes that I couldn’t stop staring into.
I knew that look.
Distant. An echo of past trauma lighting her up from within with blind terror.
Without thinking, I fell back, jostling to my feet in my rush to get off. The scent of pure fear putrefying in my lungs. The need to take it back wrestling with my still pounding need to dominate. To destroy.
“Shit,” Grey shouted as the sounds of two sets of footfalls reached me through the ringing still growing in volume in my ears. “What did you do?”
“Fuck,” came Corvus’ grunt, and I let him pull me back another step away from her.
Ava Jade slapped Grey’s hand away as she got to her feet, unable to look at any of us. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she growled, shoving him hard in the chest. Making his eyes narrow.
She stormed away, snatching up the bundle of black fabric and retrieving her blade from the wooden post.
“Wait,” I said before I could stop myself, reaching down the front of my shorts for her winnings, but by the time I looked up, she was already gone. The bramble at the edge of the lot shifting from her ghost.
I lurched forward but was stopped by a firm grip on my shoulder. Corvus. I bared my teeth, feeling too many things I didn’t want to fucking feel.
“Leave it, man,” he said. “Just leave it.”
