Now, she looked over her shoulder at him, giving him the look he’d come to understand very well. If he was addicted to her, she was addicted to him too. And that’s how he knew she was ready.
“I asked you a question,” he reminded her, and she wriggled her hips back into him, rubbing against the tent in his pants, and fuck if he didn’t want to rip into her.
“I don’t want to leave home,” she told him, and something tightened in his chest.
Home.
She’d begun to think of this as home. He was very, very pleased.
“You can’t hide forever, flamma.”
“Watch me.”
The defiance in her tone amused him. He gave her delectable ass another smack, watching it ripple under his palm, the red print darkening on her skin.
“If we don’t go back, how will you see the bald man?”
She stilled, drawing a sharp breath in. He watched as she turned her neck, her expressive eyes locking with his. Though she had been coping, her sessions with Dr. Manson doing her a world of good, he knew she pushed a lot of what she had gone through under the rug, pretending to start anew, and while he had no problem with her healing however she had to, he did have a problem with the breakdowns that sneaked up on her unannounced.
In the last two months, he had seen her collapse over tea, over seeing a naked woman with him, over not being able to go into the village because she was scared of going out of the house, over her fear of not being talkative enough to hold a conversation. Little things, so many things, that went through her mind and made her feel lesser, all coming from a place of low self-worth and fear of never being enough. With the life she’d had, no one could blame her but fuck if he didn’t want her to realize and accept just how truly powerful she was, had always been. In a war, the one who had the most effective weapons was the mightier, and she, even without knowing, had some of the most powerful weapons in the world willing to go to any lengths for her. He was just on the top of that list, so if it meant killing the main monster responsible for recent traumas, then so be it.
Hector, once Alpha Villanova’s right-hand man, now a Syndicate lapdog, was the lowest of lowlives. While Dainn didn’t have any room to judge as a killer himself, Hector was a breed of his own. He had fucked children, raped and strangled innocent women, and murdered one of Lyla’s old friend, one who had escaped and become Alpha’s sister-in-law. Dainn, as psychotic as he was, drew the line at kids, not because of morality bur because they were helpless, powerless, and it made those who preyed on them cowards who couldn’t face a grown adult.
Dainn had been tracking Hector since the day he’d taken Lyla, terrorizing him until the other man peed his pants and ran away to hide like the spineless coward that he was. He had resurfaced, and this time, the Shadow Man would pay him a visit.
“You know where he is?” she asked, rage bleaching into her words.
“Better, flamma,” he palmed her ass softly. “I have him strung up in a very good place. He’s bleeding out, one drop at a time as I play with your pussy.” She spread her legs for his fingers, wet for him already as she always was.
“Is he hurting?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“More than you ever hurt,” he promised and saw her spine relax. Good.
“I want to see that,” she said softly to the counter. “I want to see him bleed. When do we go?”
Dainn heard her vengeful words, and slowly rubbed her back in a gesture he knew soothed her. Yeah, she was ready, at least for the first step.
Chapter twenty-oneLyla
She wasn’t ready to leave the house. Over the weeks, it had become a haven, the only home she had ever known, the only heaven in her life of hell. And she wasn’t ready to let it go, unsure if she would ever return, the part of her that still questioned herself constantly wondering if he would leave her in the city. She would miss the house, the deck, the routine. She would miss cooking and being herself, meeting Dr. Manson everyday and taking walks around the garden with Bessie. She would miss it all.
She shook her head and snapped the hair tie she’d put around her wrist. Dr. Manson had suggested tying a hair tie around her wrist and snapping it whenever a bad, baseless thought entered her mind. When she'd looked up an article on the same, it said that it trained the brain to feel punished for bad thoughts and so eventually, it became more manageable.
It had been a few weeks and she could attest that it did work for her. Training her brain into different thought patterns was something she had been working on actively. Some things she did on her own, like the hair tie, like the daily tasks, like writing something good about every day. Some things she needed help with, and the man who was a nightmare to so many people helped her.