Page 141 of Venomous Desires

I swallowed hard, unable to find my voice. The burn in my chest intensified, like a fire I couldn’t put out. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t feel this way.

But it didn’t matter. The feeling was there, gnawing at me, eating me alive.

Judas’s hand slid up to my neck, his thumb brushing the back of my ear. “Don’t be shy, Ptichka,” he murmured. “You’ll get used to it.”

Get used to it? As if I’d ever get used to your existence, you psycho.

I grabbed the wineglass. If not respect, I could get drinks from him. And gulped down it in one go. The hell with this man. A man-whore. That’s what he was. His pretty face was just a facade and nothing else. A brute. A manipulator. And a dying, rotten corpse. That’s what he was.

The laughter around the table grew only louder, and I felt eyes on me. Lifting my head instinctively, I sensed Carlo’s disgusting gaze on my chest.

It was like they were circling a wounded animal, closing in, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I could feel it—thosepredatory eyes, the lewd grins, the sick anticipation hanging in the air.

I was having another drink when a felt something trailing up my ankle and I jumped, startled, spilling the drink all over my chest.

“Take it slow, darling.” Another caress and Carlo’s sick grin widened. I swallowed hard, resisting the urge to slam the glass on his head.

I wanted to move, to bolt from the room, but I was pinned in place, trapped. I was fully prepared for it—this—for him to throw me into their laps like he had that night. My body braced for it, for the humiliation, the degradation.

The bile rose in my throat.

The fact that Judas chose to remain silent throughout and his body unnaturally still.

“Bet she screams pretty,” one of them muttered, and I snapped my head at him.

Tears burned, but I just glared at him.

“Why don’t you give her to us? Let’s see if she’s as wild as she looks.”

“You want her?” Judas asked.

My heart stopped, and for a moment, everything in me went cold. This was it. The moment I’d been dreading. My body tensed, waiting for Judas to push me off his lap, to dump me into their waiting arms like some discarded toy.

But instead, his grip on me tightened. His hand slid up to the back of my neck, and he leaned over my shoulder.

“Alas, I’m not in the mood of sharing her.”

The laughter around the table faltered. “Come on, little lion. We’re just having fun. No harm in letting us—”

Before he could finish, Judas moved. It happened so fast that I barely registered it.

His hand left my neck, and in the next second, he grabbedthe dull cutlery knife from the table. The next moment, the blade was buried deep into Carlo’s eye. The sickening crunch of bone and flesh echoed through the room as the man let out a bloodcurdling scream, his hands flying to his face in shock.

Blood spurted across the table, the scarred man convulsing in his chair as Judas twisted the knife with a slow, deliberate motion. His face was calm, detached, as though he were handling a minor inconvenience rather than gouging out a man’s eye.

Everything fell deathly silent. The other men froze, their faces pale with shock as the reality of the situation hit them.

And I, I just…. stared.

Judas leaned in close to the man’s trembling body as he adjusted his glasses. “I missed his neck.”

He ripped the knife free with a brutal yank, and the man slumped back in his chair, clutching his face as blood poured from the gaping wound where his eye had been.

Judas straightened, wiping the blade clean with a napkin with methodical movements. And his other hand returned to me, resting on my waist as if nothing had happened. As if the man bleeding out in front of us was just a minor inconvenience.

Judas casually leaned back in his chair, his fingers drumming lazily on my waist. “Something to say about my property?”

No one dared to speak.