Primal Pursuit

“Don’t make a scene, pretty,” Mitch rasps. “We’d hate to do this the hard way.”

“Fuck you.”

A sharp sound zings the air, slicing past my ear. Not-Mitch’s arm goes slack around me, and I watch as he falls like a sack of potatoes. There’s a bullet hole in his temple and a mess on the ground around his head.

Mitch goes to run, and my adrenaline spikes. I jump on him, and without thinking, I stab him with the corkscrew, and he screams, flinging me off him.

Before he can move or pull the thing out of his upper chest, Davian steps out of the shadows, an avenging angel in black, one fallen down into hell’s depths.

“You have five seconds to put your fucking hands up and get on the fucking ground,” Davian says, “or you’ll end up like your friend.”

Davian reaches into his pocket as Mitch obeys.

“Catch, Rabbit.” He tosses zip ties to me. “Truss the fucker up.”

“Who the hell carries zip ties?” I ask, doing what he asks.

“Me.”

Shock spreads through me in slow waves. Not because Davian just killed someone right in front of me, and hecould have hit me with the bullet. No. Shock spreads because I liked it.

I fucking like it.

It’s thrilling.

Davian comes over and tosses me his phone. “Press three. Give the address. Hang up.”

I do as he asks. Again. And Davian hauls the guy up. “You and I are going to have a little talk.”

I follow. “I thought they were with you. You’ve had them following me for ages now, and?—”

The look on his face makes me shut my mouth.

We head to his car, and he shoves Mitch into the back seat and motions for me to get in the front. Then he drives at a sedate pace, keeping under the speed limit, obeying all the traffic rules like he doesn’t have a man in the back seat he just kidnapped. Or…because he does.

Everything Davian does is cold, smooth, calm. And I’m being smacked in the face, punched in the heart by memories.

The look on his face is the one I remember from when he killed my parents.

Only this time, it’s there because of me. He killed because of me. To save me.

I lick dry lips and dig my nails into my thighs. “Who are they? Why are they following me?”

“That, Rabbit, is something we’re going to have fun finding out.”

At the warehouse loft, in that basement where we fucked, where he wrote on me, I watch as Davian chains the man up.

“You,” Davian growls. “You tried to hurt my rabbit. And I don’t like people doing that to my property.”

I stand, trying to control the wild breath that forces its way from me, struggle to draw air in normally.

Property.

His property.

I should be horrified. But I’m not.

His possessiveness, willingness to kill for me, is a turn on. An aphrodisiac. And this entire scene, this setup, the danger and the darkness, it has me slammed with a thrill I’ve never felt before. It’s a mix of arousal and power, and I love how it makes me tingle everywhere all at once. It’s like heroin injected straight into my soul, awaking the deepest, darkest parts of me I never knew I had.