Page 605 of The Bonding Games: Part 1

“It’s fucking obvious! And excuse me for not wanting to discuss that with you when it’s Vengeance’s business! Her fucking trauma! I’m an asshole but not that much of one! I know what it’s like to have the story of your abuse thrown about, to have yourself talked about like you’re nothing but a pity case!”

Sound pops back clearly like a bubble bursting.

“We wouldn’t throw it around, you bastard! And no one sees her like that—”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“Ezla, Love, are you alright? Is it true?” Scotty’s gentle voice that interrupts their argument cannot control the unsteadiness in it, the fracturing of his composure at Cooper’s revelation and its possible truthfulness.

I open my mouth after getting my weave of lies straight, but Cooper beats me to it . . . except with nothing but the disgraceful, shameful truth he has uncovered: “It’s her father who’s been doing all of this!” His head swivels back to me. “I bet he beats you often, doesn’t he? Along with the fucking shit he’s clearly doing with the Avri!” He does not wait for my denial before he continues venomously, “He’s the source of that fucking agony we all get bursts of. He sliced his own daughter’s face, and he made you wear that bloody helmet to hide it! To hide the fact he went further and chose to scar it, to showcase it with his own Avri like some perverted claim of ownership! And I’m betting on everything that a part of his cluster has direct control over it so he can cause pain whenever he feels like it! That part I only just fucking figured out, because this horror story never fucking ends, does it?! So who’s to say there’s not even more?” Bile climbs up my throat, and I do not know why I simply sit here, numbly, pathetically, not even defending myself. “What else does he do to you, huh? Huh?!”

“Cooper, that’s enough,” Scotty warns, but his voice is hoarse, and I know he and the others are all listening to his words, absorbing them, assessing their validity.

Cooper leans closer, shoving Scotty’s hand away that had pressed to his chest to ward him off me. I glare at him more maliciously than ever before, more malevolence pouring off of me than I have ever given anyone besides the man he currently speaks of.

He glares right back, though his is mostly aimed at my father, I know, not me. Even if he is so obviously sick of my lies.

Grabbing the back of my neck with one hand and my head in the other, he drags me closer, our faces pausing merely centimetres apart. “Am. I. Wrong?”

Through my gnashing teeth, my harsh breaths are more like the hisses of a poisonous snake preparing to unleash her venom.

His voice drops to a low, lethal whisper. “Am. I. Wrong?”

But I cannot speak. For once, I do not have a web of effective responses to avert attention from the topic at hand. For once, I cannot find my defences.

Cooper has been the biggest problem here this entire time: I have known he was figuring things out, and I’d had to be very, very careful around him especially. With the past I have caught glimpses of in his mind when he thinks about it, I have known exactly how alike we are in some aspects. Yet I turned out way worse than him, way more cruel and vicious and volatile. I grew to love violence, while he only loathed it. I understand him better than most others could, but that has always meant he could understand me in the same way.

I hate him for it.

I want him for it.

The air thickens, thrumming with a new kind of tension, a new kind of heat I had never felt before him or my other Bonded.

His eyes drop to my lips.

His breathing as ragged and rapid as mine, I only catch a glimpse of his before they slam onto my own.

50

COOPER

My mouth devours Ezla’s, and I yank her closer, dick instantly hardening to steel and begging to sink inside her wet heat.

She’s fucking infuriating.

I’m so bloody in love with her.

And everything’s out in the open now: In my usual dickish fashion, I lacked any sensitivity when I spat out all of Vengeance’s secrets and any further suspicions I gained along the way. But now everyone knows. And it was clear from their reactions they all understood it as the truth.

There’s still more to discover, more nightmares to unravel, a hell of a lot more to our Bonded’s trauma than I’ve just exposed that’s still waiting to escape the cages it’s hidden away in. We will get to the bottom of it all, and in the end, we will make the sick bastard who calls himself her father pay.

But right now, the only thing at the forefront of my mind is Vengeance.

I don’t hold back on my kiss, not at all, wanting to get everything I’m feeling, the raucous crowd of emotions within me, all out and into her. Hands skating down her back while I suck her bottom lip into my mouth with a grunt, I grab a handful of each of her ass cheeks, giving them a firm squeeze. Hauling her up by my strong grip, I then set her on my lap so she’s straddling me, and she instantly wraps her arms around my neck and grinds down at the same moment I roll my hips up, creating a delicious friction that has us both moaning into each other’s mouths—though hers sounds as pissed as it is pleasured, as if she hates how I make her body sing.

Tiger can’t resist commentary, of course, and I vaguely hear, “Goddamn! This is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen! The heat and passion and ferocity!”

Quickly dismissing him and any other words exchanged between him and the other Evots I’ve got so close to in such a short amount of time, I use my hold on Ezla’s backside to help her ride me dry as she nips my lower lip and tugs, a sharp sting following when her teeth dig in harder, and rapture wooshes through me.