CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MIRA

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Daniel’s stiff, girthy erection stirs me awake. It’s an unforgiving force wedged against my mound, a hot bulge burning through the thin material of my oddly damp panties and his boxers to tease my swollen clit. Its heavy length tempts me to rub, to rock my core along his impressive shaft. To rock until I shudder and release the way I do humping my pillow.

Daniel would be better than a pillow. He has hands to grab and guide me. He has lips he can run up my neck, close around my nipples. He’d hold me against the hard contours of his chest as I leave my marks up his back with my nails.

Currently, he’s asleep, oblivious to the war roaring out of control through me as I debate my choices.

I’m wrapped around him with one leg hooked over his hip. My arm is latched around his neck and we’re chest to chest, crotch to crotch. His arms are protective bands around my torso.

I never feel safer than I do when I wake up like this. Cocooned in his chest, guarded from the world, nothing can hurt me. He makes living bearable, especially when he breaks a door down to get to me.

Fuck, that had been hot. In the moment, when I’d opened my eyes to darkness, the bed next to me an ocean of cold sheets, waking up alone had terrified me. Every other time, coming out of a nightmare, he’d been there. Without fail.

Every. Time.

This time, I’d been alone. Alone with the image of Daniel broken and bloody across an unforgiving highway, getting crushed and mangled by speeding vehicles that refused to stop while I tried desperately to get to him but ... no one would stop. They kept going faster. Hitting him from all sides. Rolling over him.

I squeeze my eyes shut, willing the nausea and tears back. I catch my breath in my chest, containing the sob I can feel expanding like a bomb in the cage of my ribs.

For those horrific seconds, I believed he was dead. He was gone and I was back in a world where he was no more because Daniel was always in bed with me. Always. And he wasn’t so he was dead, and I was ready to lose my fucking mind, to collapse entirely into the void of madness when I heard him. Heard the slam of his fist against the door and I remembered I locked it out of sheer, stupid pettiness.

I scrambled off the sweat soaked mattress and started running to let him in, part of me convinced this was part of the dream where I would find myself back on the side of the highway, reliving the scene, but he broke down the door.

He’d charged in like he was ready to fight the nightmares with his bare hands. I will never forget the fury and madness in his eyes when they swept over the room and finally settled on me.

I couldn’t get into his arms fast enough. I couldn’t hold him any tighter. I needed him fused into my body, a permanent limb I could protect. Where no one could take him from me.

“Awake, baby?”

Daniel’s quiet murmur rumbles down the center of both our bodies. It tickles the hairs at my temple where his lips brush the words.

I nod because I know my voice will betray the emotions tight in my throat.

Daniel’s big, strong hands brush up and along the arch of my spine. It lifts the back of my top over the curve of my backside, exposing the skin to the morning chill.

I shiver, but the tremor doesn’t last for a second when his hand is in my hair. Fisting in the strands. My yelp of pain is silenced with the buck and twist of his powerful body shoving me over and under.

I’m pinned beneath him with my hair caught in his fingers and my thighs full of his hips. My arms are trapped between us, useless. I can’t breathe and it has nothing to do with him crushing me into the mattress with all that beautiful flesh and muscle.

His mouth is inches from mine.

Inches.

They brush when I gasp his name, and I feel the contact straight to my toes.

“Quiet, you bad girl.” His head lowers. His nose bumps my cheek. My stomach flips at the gesture. “We need to talk. We need to set some fucking rules. We need a firm understanding that if you ever lock yourself in a place I can’t reach you when you need me, I will remove every door in the house. I will remove every lock. You are never allowed to do something like that again. Understand?”

The heat in his eyes, the feral weight of anger barely masked beneath a fragile calm has my heart quickening. My mouth goes dry. There is no humor in the way he’s waiting for an answer, and I can’t catch my breath.

“Yes,” I whisper.

His lips ghost my cheek, millimeters from the corner of my mouth. The morning stubble lining his chiseled jaw tickles my skin and I ache to feel it against other sensitive areas of my body, but the hand in my hair takes that moment to tighten, to drag my head back.

I groan a sound torn deep from my chest, a guttural sob of raw pleasure. My body heaves with the sweet pain crashing down my spine. The cock wedged against my mound is hot metal wrapped in silk and I fucking want it. I want it slamming into me, breaking me. Destroying my sanity.

“Please. God, please, Daniel,” I beg, shameless. Desperate. “Please.”

I would give him anything, anything he wants. I would sell him my soul. He has me so close to the edge, I only need a nudge. A flick.

But he has me pinned. Not an inch of space for any kind of friction while he sucks my neck. Marks my skin.

“Quiet,” he growls into the hammering pulse at my neck. “I’m not done.”

Against my will, a moan escapes my chest. It vibrates up my throat to where he’s back inches over my parted lips.

His fingers tighten. Strands of hair are torn from their root, but I feel nothing, except every part of him aligned with mine. Every breath he takes. Every twitch of his cock.

“Look at me, Mira.” He waits until my lashes have lifted away from that haunting mouth, and he’s captured me in the dark pits of his promise. “If you ever mention another man fucking you, touching you, tasting you, I will kill him.” His free hand brushes my cheek gently, calmly. Like he’s not threatening to take a life for me. “I will do unimaginable things to him, and when I’m done, I’ll make you help me bury his body.” He ignores my weak whimper of a gasp. “No one is allowed in your pussy,” his lips brush my jaw, “your ass,” he skims a kiss to the tip of my nose, “your mouth unless I let them use you. You are mine. Do you understand?”

My heart is pounding in my chest. It’s a frantic bird filled with confusion and desire. It knows I shouldn’t like the things he’s saying. Shouldn’t be thrilled by the possessive purr of his words he’s planting into my skin with every stroke of his lips. I definitely shouldn’t be getting wet or excited by the only part of that whole speech that actually took root in my brain.

“Do you mean it?” I pant.

“Every fucking bit of it. Mine, Mira. All fucking mine.”

I’m trying not to squeal with unimaginable happiness as I drag my hands free and up his hard muscles to cradle the back of his neck.

He said it twice yesterday, but that was yesterday and he could have changed his mind.

“You’re mine,” I tell him.

My tormentor lifts his head. His expression soft, loving. He brushes my cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Always.”

I’m a grown woman. I may not have all the experiences in the world and my past relationship consists of one boyfriend who wound up cheating on me, but Daniel isn’t Kalen. He’s not a teenage boy with teenage hormones and careless hands. When Daniel tells me I’m his, only his, I brim with excitement, fear, apprehension, panic. I’m flooded by every emotion and sensation and so lost in the need to do something drastic and crazy that I don’t think, can’t think.

“I love you,” I blurt.

My heart cracks hard against my ribcage. It throws itself up into my throat. I’m choking on my horror and desperation. I’m freaking out and I can hear the alarm bells sounding in my head, calling me every kind of idiot, because Daniel’s eyes have gone wide. His entire body has gone rigid atop of mine. He’s not moving. I’m pretty sure he’s not breathing, and I can’t breathe. I’m ready to take it back, to crawl out from under him and throw myself out the window.

“Mira.”

Oh God, he’s going to tell me that’s sweet, but he doesn’t feel the same. That I’m too young and stupid to know what actual love is. Or worse, he’ll tell me it’s in my head. That I think I love him because he’s all I have in the world, and he’s partially right. He is all I have, but that’s not why I love him. Not the only reason.

“Please don’t,” I gasp, shredding the plea through clenched teeth. “I didn’t...”

His fingers capture my chin and I’m being forced to face the man who’s about to destroy me.

“Look at me, brat,” he coaxes, and I realize I’ve squeezed my eyes shut to keep from imprinting his face in that devastating moment to memory.

Tears spill with the parting of my eyelids. They slide down my temples into my hairline as I make myself look at him.

“You don’t have to say it back,” I press, vomiting the words before he can speak. “You don’t have to feel the same. I’m not—”

“Quiet,” he murmurs, pressing his thumb into my lips. “I can’t live without you. I don’t want to. You have come to mean everything to me, and I would die—”

I clamp my hand over his mouth, a new panic seizing my throat. “Don’t say that.”

His hot breath burns my palm with the gentle kiss he plants against the skin before tugging my hand away. “—without you,” he finishes gently. “I love you, too, baby girl.”

I’m crying all over again. It’s probably ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s normal or natural, but hearing Daniel tell me he loves me has my whole being crumbling with joy.

Daniel holds me, telling me again and again like he knows I need to hear it a million times to fully believe I’m not crazy.

“No more tears,” he murmurs as I sniffle and make an absolute mess of this beautiful moment, but he only grins down at me, wiping each rogue tear away. “Now, what are our two new rules?”

I suck in a wet breath and croak out, “No locked doors. No other men, except you ... and Christian.”

That close, I don’t miss the way his eyes dilate. The way his cock twitches.

“Do you want Christian, Mira?”

He said I could have his brother, too. He said it twice. Said he liked it, but I still hesitate before whispering, “Yes.”

His chest expands against mine. “Does my baby want me to share her with my brother?”

God, the way he groans the words makes my sanity capsize. It emboldens something in me that contradicts the rampant crash of my heart against my ribs.

“You said I could have him, too.” I peek up at him through my lashes. “Can I?”

The hand in my hair is practically vibrating with his restraint, with the straining thread of control he’s barely clinging to.

“Beg,” he growls. “Beg me to let my brother use my baby’s tight holes.”

“Please,” I blurt before he even finishes. “Please let your brother fuck me.”

His chest expands against mine with his delicious groan. It washes across my face and I feel myself gasp.

“Only Christian. Only me. Anyone else touches you and I’ll kill them.”

I swallow audibly. “I don’t want anyone else.”

“Good.”

I’m still reeling with everything that’s happened since opening my eyes when his mouth finds mine.

It’s quick.

It’s done and over before I can process that it actually happened.

“Wait!” I gasp, fingers tightening in his hair. “I wasn’t ready. Again.”

Daniel chuckles. The vibration tingles between our bodies to make my clit pang. “Get dressed. If your stomach growls any louder, people might think there’s a bear nearby.”

He’s rolling off before I can press the issue. He drags me to my feet and gives my ass a firm smack, propelling me towards the bathroom.

I could have been made of pure air the way I float into the shower. My face aches from the stupid grin I can’t wipe away. My stomach is a circus of chaos, joy and love.

For once in two years, I ignore the creeping approach of dead threatening to overtake my light. It hovers in the distance, a dark cloud reminding me how selfish I’m being. I’m risking Daniel’s life because I’m too much of a coward to let him go. Now that I said it and he said it ... what if that’s all it takes? The curse killed people I loved.

I just told Daniel I loved him.

Cold, numbing fingers cross over the flame of happiness, crushing the spark in my chest.

I doomed him.

How could I be so stupid?

I slap the water off, grab my towel and bolt, still dripping into the bedroom to find the door open and Daniel still on my bed. His hair is damp strands pushed back from a freshly shaven face. He’s no longer in his boxers, but dark jeans and a long-sleeved top. Everything about him is perfect and devastating, and I want him so badly it hurts.

But I’ve already caused so much damage I have to fix.

“I take it back.”