Craved: A Chosen Ones Novel (14 page)

Bennett knocked my hand aside with as much effort as he would use to swat at a fly. He swung his arm out and in a wide arc. The curved blade moved towards my neck on a trajectory to cleave my head from my body. He turned his hand in and his elbow out at the last possible moment and jabbed his elbow into the side of my neck instead. Pain rang out from the spot and I struggled to catch my breath. His legs swept mine out from under me in a move identical to the one I’d pulled on Tara. The curved blade came down on my neck just forcefully enough to draw a thin strip of blood along its edge.

 
“Pull your shit together,” he whispered low and for my ears alone. “You are letting your emotions get the better of you and it is making you sloppy. You let them make you lose control and you might as well slit your own throat. You are as good as dead anyway. When you fight angry, you stop thinking rationally and you become an easy kill. Lock it back up. Put it the fuck out of your mind. If you can’t do that then you don’t patrol. You take your ass to class, you go the fuck to the heavily warded house in North Fulton, and you do whatever it is normal people your age do. You got it?”
 

I would have nodded, but the blade still cut delicately into my skin. “I got it,” I gritted out against the pain.
 

He pressed the blade harder against my neck, not enough to do any real damage, but enough to increase the sting. Then he withdrew it and leapt to his feet. He left me to my own devices to haul mysely to mine.
 

“I could heal you, but I’m not. Yet. I’ll do it tomorrow before it begins to scar. Until then, let the pain be a reminder.” The words were spoken loud enough for everyone to hear. They were for me as well as everyone else within earshot and even those who were not. If anyone healed me before he did, there would be hell of the worse kind to pay.
 

I would have laughed if my throat didn’t feel like it had been doused in gasoline then had a lit match thrown on it. His threatening words were a waist of breath. No one would go against something he did anyway. The twins would—

NO!
I yelled inside my head. Bennett was right. I didn’t know why things that were better left buried kept trying to creep into my thoughts. Like Bennett said I needed to put them the fuck out of my mind.

I climbed out of the ring and glimpsed Chase standing beside it as I did so, his expression dark and feral. I ignored it and him. I walked by him without acknowledging him and headed for the locker room.
 

I used a wet cloth to gently dab the blood away then stared at my reflection in the mirror above one of the sinks.
 

The person looking back at me was someone I thought I was finally leaving behind for good. She was the Alex that was born twelve years ago and the Alex who reemerged two years ago. She felt alone and scared and angry and traumatized and was completely fucked up in the head all at the same fucking time. I thought about encountering the Brethren in the alley a few nights back and how close things had come to turning out differently. Even though I got away, if Chase hadn’t been there I would have bled out in the middle of the street or the Brethren would have found me unconscious once he recovered and finished what he started. Either way I would have died. I found a part of me wishing that night did end differently. I’d never actually attempted suicide and I never actually would, but the thought of death did hold a certain allure, a certain promise of freedom, of eternal numbness and permanent weightlessness.

The sound of the door opening and someone walking across the tile floor shook me free of my macabre thoughts. The last thing I expected to see appear in the mirror behind me were a pair of sapphire eyes, narrowed from the intensity with which they looked at me.
 

“I decided.” I didn’t turn to face him as I spoke. I continued staring in the mirror into my own eyes and not his. If I looked into his, the words I forced out might not come. “This morning and last night did not happen. I can’t go there, wherever
there
is, with you.”

My focus remained on myself but I still saw his unchanged, narrowed, and intense gaze out of the corner of my vision. I closed my eyes fooling myself into thinking that when I re-opened them he would be gone, my words having effectively turned him away. I felt the heat of his body standing directly behind me, crowding my space and when I opened my eyes, my vision confirmed what I’d already known. He was still there.

He placed both hands on my waist and turned me around to face him. He crowded my space even more, pushing between my legs, forcing them apart to accommodate him as he did. My heartbeat spread up as it became a little bit harder to breathe. His presence was strong and nearly overwhelming. It threatened to pull me into it, take me prisoner, and never release me. The thought should have frightened the shit out of me but my body burned in every spot that made contact with him.
 

“I figured as much when you didn’t acknowledge me either time out there. I told you the truth when I said I was trying to be decent. But it was also the truth when I said that doing so has never been one of my finer qualities. I lied to you Alex. And yes, I’m a bastard for it but I don’t give a shit. There is only one decision that I will go along with and the one you claim to have made isn’t it.”
 

I didn’t like the way his words and his body pressed into mine were making me feel. They made my body react in complete contradiction to the words I’d just declared. I pushed at him placing my hands on his chest, but he corralled my wrists with one hand and held them tightly. He rocked his hips forward, pressing them into me and making sure I felt every hard inch that made up the length of him along my core. He brought his free hand to my neck and circled it around my throat. For a fleeting moment, my heart raced even quicker than it already was doing and I thought his hand would crushingly close around it next. Like… like before. All of my weapons lay back in the ring and there was no way in hell I could outmuscle him.
 

I heard the words “
Nunc ergo curate
” being muttered and I felt a warming sensation beneath where his hand closed over the skin on my neck.

He took his hand away then replaced it with his lips against the hollow of my throat. I felt a different type of warming feeling in the spot that his lips touched. It traveled down my neck and the back of my spine at the same time. It settled in my core and made the tips of my toes curl.
 

“You healed me?” I asked both dazed and confused. Why would he do that? Bennett had made it clear he would skin anybody alive who did.
 

“I did,” he held my gaze still staring intently into my eyes.

“But Bennett—“

My words were cut off by the lethal expression that flashed through his stare. The light in his sapphire eyes didn’t just dim, it darkened and the shadows that moved behind them was akin to how it looked when a fierce storm is brewing.When he spoke, it was more of the growl of a ruthless predator than a man sane with his humanity in tact.

“Bennett can go fuck himself. He’s fortunate that you are close to him. Otherwise, after that little display of what a colossal ass he is I’d—“ He swallowed hard. Then closed his eyes on a deep breath that was meant to calm the temper that had flared. When he opened his eyes, they glittered with the usual light that inhabited them.

“Can you release my wrists?” I looked down at them still bound in his hands pointedly.

His response was a wolfish grin. “Only if you promise not to try to push me away again.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “I won’t push you away.”

“Promise,” he prodded.

“I promise,” I said even though I had every intention of breaking it.
 

He let my wrists go and I shoved at his chest. I shoved a second time throwing the weight of my body into it to get him to budge. I figured out what a terrible idea that was when all throwing my weight into him did was close the little bit of space that lingered between us. The move crushed my breasts against his chest and my nipples hardened in response to the heat I felt through the fabric of my top from him being shirtless.
 

His eyes flashed dark again, but with a different kind of emotion. “You lied Alex.”

“So did you Chase.” I meant to drawl the words but in the midst of saying them his hands cupped my butt and he hoisted me onto the sink. He wrapped my legs around his waist and pressed the hardness of himself in between them. It sparked something that made the words come out on a breathy moan instead.
 

“Fuck, Alex,” he groaned into my ear. “Say my name like that again.” It was sixty percent a demand and forty percent a plea.
 

He said it while his hips jerked into me, grinding into my center. The action short circuited my brain and made me lose all good sense.
 

“Chase,” I moaned his name again.
 

His lips punishingly crushed down on mine and in response I wrapped my arms around his neck and tangled my hands in his curls. My thighs squeezed together of their own volition trapping him and increasing the friction from him grinding against the feverish spot between them. His hands slid up my lower back and circled around to the flat plane of my lower belly. He fingers caressed the waist line of my pants and I thought about what it would feel like if he dipped them down past the band and slid them inside my panties. My back arched at the thought of what the fingers I’d pictured replacing my own in the shower would feel like splayed and moving inside of me.
 
The action made his length brush against the most intimate, sensitive part of me and left the bud pulsing. My body shook and I felt myself on the precipice of something that someone else hadn’t induced in me in a long time. In that moment I
craved a
release and had he peeled away the barrier of my clothes and his, I would have opened my legs wider, arched against him and begged him to enter me. The vision of him doing so was already playing itself out in my head. My core throbbed harder at what I imagined it would feel like. My hands moved from his hair to grip his back and I arched violently against him.

 
“Chase…” I moaned again. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. What demand or request or plea would escape out of my mouth.

He ground against me just as violently. “Yes, Alex. Fuck. Say it. Whatever it is tell me and I swear I will do whatever you want. I’ll give you whatever you need. What do you need Alex? Say it. So I can give it to you.”

Oh God the feel of him against me felt so good. I needed more. I needed the absence of clothing. I needed him to take me over the edge that I was already teetering on the brink of. I opened my mouth to tell him that. The locker room door opened then slammed shut and approaching footsteps echoed against the tiles. Chase growled in frustration low and deep into my ear. Then he picked me up and placed my feet on the ground and stepped back from me abruptly.

“Alex are you okay?!” Charissa high heels clicked across the floor as she walked brusquely toward me. She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger and tilted my head back. Her thinly arched eyebrows knitted together when she did not see a scratch across my throat. “Did you heal her?” She said turning to Chase.

“I did.” His eyes dared her to reproach him for it.

She eyed him for a moment, wordlessly taking his measure then nodded curtly. “Good.”

She turned back to me. “Bennett acted like a bastard and I want you to know he got an earful and more from me for what he did. It was over the top and uncalled for. I told him the next time he pulls some shit like that I will crush his goddamn balls in my bare hands.”

Guilt pricked at me for causing a fight between them. I tried to diffuse the situation and her indignation on my behalf. “You didn’t have to take up for me. I deserved the smack down. He’s right. I crossed a line when I pulled a knife on Tara and made her bleed. And it was just me acting stupidly and out of control because I let shit get to me on a level that I know is dangerous. I needed the reminder that Bennett gave me.”

“Bullshit,” Charissa spat. “He went too far. He provoked you on purpose. He knows it, I know it and you know it. He could have gone about proving his point in a different manner. And that bitch deserved what she got. She crossed a line first. She went for your face.”

Charissa looked about ready to murder all parties involved except me. I needed to calm her down. “Still, it’s okay. Chase healed me and I’m no worse for the wear. Bennett reminded me of an important lesson. I can’t allow my emotions to get the better of me. I don’t think clearly when I do and it’s a guaranteed way to end up dead in a fight. If it’d been a daemon and not Bennett and I’d been on the streets instead of in a ring, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Yeah, he was a jerk, but in his painful as shit way he was just trying to knock some sense into me and save me from getting myself killed. Don’t be too pissed off at him. He might have saved my life.”

She let out a loud, still pissed off huff. “You’re an adult Alex. You don’t have to take his shit.”

“Trust me, I know. But on this one let it go. Please? For me? I hate it when y’all fight and I especially hate it when I’m the cause of it.”

Some of the anger receded from her hazel eyes. “Fine. For you. But just this time. If he pulls some shit to that extent again, I
will
thoroughly fuck him up on your behalf. My husband or not. You’re my kid as much as Ari and Cole are. I will go all mother bear on his ass over you just like I would over them. He loves y’all but his methods and parenting can be extreme sometimes. I know it’s because the thought of losing any of you to some shit drives him bugfuck, but still, it is not an excuse.”

“I know and you’re right.”
 

She looked at me hard. “Don’t patronize me Alex.”

“I’m not,” I promised her. “I do know and you are right.”

She narrowed her eyes at me then they softened. “Are you sure you are alright?”