Page 66 of My Unhinged Alphas
I pull back just enough to look at her, both of us breathing harder now, both of us too close, too aware. “Jesus,” I mutter under my breath. My thumb drags along her jaw, slower this time, more deliberate. “You really don’t know what you’re doing to me,” I say quietly.
Her lips part like she’s about to say something?—
The door slams open.
“What the hell is going on?”
Chapter 10
Vale
The room goes stillin the way it does right before violence.
I feel it before I see it, in the pressure that settles in the air, in the way Lena’s breathing changes behind Havoc, in the way my own body locks down around the pain still burning across my back.
The flogging should have steadied me. It should have burned the wanting out of me, skinned it down to something manageable, something I could bury under discipline and prayer and pain. Instead, every stripe across my back feels raw beneath my shirt, every movement dragging fire across half-healed skin, and none of it has done a damned thing to erase the memory of her against the wall.
Her mouth. Her hands.
The way she looked at me after seeing my face and didn’t recoil.
Then I walk in and find Havoc touching her, Knox watching like he can’t close his eyes.
“We’re having an interrogation,” Havoc says, like that explains anything. “Try to keep up.”
I look past him. Lena is in the chair, flushed and unsteady, her lips swollen, her hair a mess from his hands. One look tells me enough. Whatever this is, he pushed too far.
My stomach turns.
The welts across my back throb under my shirt. Every mark I left on myself wakes up at once, as if my body knows humiliation when it sees it. I wanted pain to strip her out of me. I wanted the sting, the heat, the punishment to leave me emptied out and disciplined again.
“That’s not what it looks like,” I say. The sentence sounds thin even to me.
Havoc glances at Lena, then back at me, and his smile shifts into something meaner. “No? Could’ve fooled me.”
Lena’s eyes flick between us. She says nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s standing in the middle of, and I hate that she has to watch this at all.
I move farther into the room. My back protests immediately. I ignore it.
“Havoc.”
I don’t need volume. He knows what that tone means.
He laughs. “What?” he asks. “You want to do this your way?”
I don’t answer.
That gives him room, and he takes it. “You going to stand there and act holy after having your fingers inside her not even an hour ago?”
For a moment, I forget how to breathe.
Lena makes a small sound behind him. Shock. Embarrassment. I don’t look at her. I can’t.
Havoc watches my face and sees enough. Of course he does.
“I smelled her on you,” he says. “Still can.”
The words land low in my gut. Not because he’s telling me anything I don’t know. Because he says it out loud. Because she hears it. Because I tried to scour that from myself and failed.
