“Anyway,” she said, “it’s probably good that Thay doesn’t want me.”
She was always doing that, breaking the goddamn rules, calling himThay,and draping herself over our humanity like a silent kiss.
“Why is that?”
She laughed into my muscles. “I don’t know,” she bit her lip. “Maybe I am not very good at it.”
“At what?” I closed my book, tossing her a look.
“Sex. I mean, it’s…”
What the hell was she talking about? Everything about this girl made me want to get naked. More than that, she was intuitive, always searching for deeper meanings and underlying truths. I had watched the way she adjusted when breaths changed, and muscles tensed, noticing how the slightest inflection in tone shifted her entire narrative. If that wasn’t the recipe for a life-changing fuck, I didn’t know what was.
“What?” I stared down at her. “Sex is what?”
“Boring,” she confessed with a shrug, and I nearly died beside her. “Never intense enough. I mean, I don’t even come.”
Heat slid into my veins in slow, thinking waves. Part of me wanted to find whoever touched her first and cut off his dick so I could shove it up Threx’s goddamn ass for allowing this to happen to her. That some man taught her she was just a hole to fill and walk away from made all the quiet parts of me go violent, even if that was how I fucked most of the time.
“It’s probably me, though,” she took a breath. “Maybe I’m broken.”
I winced. She was too damn perfect to be fractured like the rest of us. I knew it from the first time she slept beside Nathem until his fever broke, applying cold compresses to a stranger’s forehead, and the anchoring circles she drew on Jessie’s arms in the quiet light of the common room. Nothing about Daphne was loud or performative; she just made everything better.
I stared down at her, feeling the shadows creep into my vision until my knuckles tightened.
“Daphne?” Her eyes snapped up, clocking the edge in my voice as if I had her by the throat.
There was another part of me that craved her in the dark. A strange ache I had never given to anyone else but wanted to give to her.
“Yeah?” She braced for impact.
So fucking smart. Such a good fucking girl.
My dick swelled and stretched toward her the way it had since the moment I saw her. I couldn’t help but get hard at the thought of being the person who would teach her all the things that she refused to admit to herself.
“You’re not broken.”
She quirked a brow, shoving me slightly. “Well, my body is.”
“No, it is not,” I growled again, hating how sure she was about this. “You are just fucking halfwits who don’t know a pussy from a hole in a wall.”
“Or,” she sneered, and my grip fell to the line of her panties. She eyed it warily, but continued to speak, “I am broken. Like I said!”
A trace of defiance hit me in the chest, and my hands dropped low between her legs in a tight squeeze.
“Oh,” she moaned as I rolled it against her, palming her so fucking hard until she was dripping. Sliding. Grinding. Taking the world with me!
“Doesn’t feel broken to me,” I whispered into her hair.
That was when I knew I wanted to wrap my arms around her pretty little throat forever.
Daphne whimpered when I removed my touch, and I would spend the rest of my night talking myself out of the very thing I would do to her hours later. I did not know then that the sound of her breaking over my cock would tie a knot in me so deep that I could never carve it out.
“You’ve been looking at your phone a lot this morning,” Lyla mentioned from the shadows, the naked silhouette creating a bigger void in me than I wanted. I shook off the memory and drew in a breath.
“Thanks for that observation,” I exhaled through my nose. There was a hit on this woman, and our severed fingerprint would not hold for much longer. Not that it mattered. I suspected Karsten was in on the fact that we held the contract after he told me one of our own took that picture of Daphne and sent it to him. Maybe. It could also be a ploy to turn me against my men, which worked. Rinley was as good as dead once I got proof it was him.
“Why don’t you come back to bed?” she said, leaning away so I could see her tits. They were smaller than Daphne’s, pert, and didn’t possess that bounce I craved. In fact, Lyla brought nothing I wanted, which is precisely why I chose her.