Page 32 of Blackmailing Belle (The Lost Girls #4)

Chapter 32

Wolf in the Lion’s Den

THE BEAST OF BOSTON

I sabelle doesn’t wake when I get up and go outside to call Tock.

"Send a car back to the docks, use my GPS location."

"Is she alright?" Tock’s voice is tense, disapproving, and conflicted as he asks after Isabelle’s wellbeing.

He's seen me rip the heads off of those who have betrayed or inconvenienced me, and his loyalty has always been unwavering, until this moment.

Tock’s fealty goes to my wife first now. Disgust rises in me.

Despite the fact that her family is the one that slaughtered mine. Tock wants to know if she’s okay.

"She’s fine. Send the car," I practically spit in the phone before hanging up so hard the phone crunches in my human hand.

Everything hurts, in some of the old ways and some new. I furiously fucked my wife until my body was sore yet depleted. The old grief that has haunted me has torn me open anew in a bloody wash of violence that makes it hard to think or see straight.

Standing naked on the dock in the rolling cold of sunrise, I plant my feet more firmly into the wet wood underneath me.

I don’t want to go back inside. I don’t want to look at the wolf in my den.

She didn’t kill your family. Isabelle shunned and denied them. She wasn’t even with them when your family was killed.

Because of my exhausted state, logic gets its chance to make its case.

Still, it doesn’t erase the rage, the insanity of choosing this woman as my wife. Perhaps someone would call it some kind of poetic fucking irony. But all I can think yet again is that I must have karmically brought down this hell on myself somehow.

My keen senses pick up the hum of an engine, the approach of a car. It’s still a distance away but I need to go back inside and get Isabelle.

The anvil in my chest grows heavier.

I can’t be with her. Not anymore. Not after this. I close my eyes, resolving that I don’t give a fuck if I don’t create a pack again. I don’t care if my half-shifted state kills me anymore. The only thing I need to do before I die is take out the Wolves. They will all die painful, bloody deaths, and then afterward I can lay down too and join my family. There’s nothing else for me but vengeance.

The freezing air only turns my internal calm even colder and more resolute.

I’m done with Isabelle, and I plan to send her away. Far away. I have the ability to move her bookstore across the country, or maybe even to one of the fae realms. All I know is I never want to see her again after today .

Because seeing her will always be a reminder of what her family has done to mine. Of finding my mother crumpled on the dance floor in a pool of blood. Of my father, who was barely recognizable. As if they had targeted him specifically or maybe stood over his already dead corpse continuing to release rounds of bullets into his body and face to make a point, or just for the fun of it. Of Lisette.

I walk back inside the shack and find Isabelle still sleeping on the floor. One of us must have found some blankets in the night, I’m not sure who, and she is wrapped up in them though they don’t cover her body entirely.

In the cold, dark shack, she is yet again a spot of color and warmth. Her mahogany hair rolls over her outstretched arm. I expect to feel disgust when I set my eyes upon her, but shock slices through it all.

Isabelle’s body is a map of my wrath. Purple, red, even some yellow and green has bloomed over her arms, her shoulders, her breasts. They intersect or are interrupted by teeth marks that are caked with blood. I bit her breasts, her neck, and though the blanket covers it, I know I sunk my jaws into her inner thighs and along her back as I fucked her over and over again. Even at her hairline, sweat and blood has dried.

My once cold resolve sloshes in a twisting spire of nausea.

I took out all my pain, all my anger and grief on my wife’s body, and she took it. She welcomed it.

Give it to me. I can handle all of it.

Her words were sincere and full of compassion.

I want to look away, but I refuse to allow myself to. I was an absolute animal to her. But then again. . .so was she.

She never once said stop. Not that I’m sure I would have been able to control myself and abide by such a request. The thought sickens me. But Isabelle begged for more, screamed my name in pleasure until she was hoarse. I touch my abs where she grazed thin red lines across my flesh. I run the pads of my fingers over my shoulder. She bit into me too, muffling her screams, marking me like I do to her.

They hurt her too. Logic speaks up louder this time. Isabelle isn’t one of them. Roman and her entire family betrayed her. They hurt her father and forced her to change her entire life, leaving everything she knew because she was a victim.

No. Isabelle isn’t a victim. She’s too strong-willed to take on that identity, and I know my wife well enough now that she would be irritated to ever hear me call her that. But they hurt her deeply, irrevocably, and she wouldn’t stand for it, breaking off all ties with the money, the power, and her family.

And now she’s my family. I made her that way. I didn’t look enough into her past. It doesn’t matter. The pile of reasons I gathered made her perfect to be my wife, and they are no less perfect now. Though the reasons she’s perfect have multiplied by a factor of thousands. From the way she reads a book, to how she speaks with Mrs. Potts, to how she looks at me seductively from underneath those dark lashes and glasses. To her fuzzy robe and all the romance book-themed tee shirts she wears. My wife is far more than the blood relation to those fuckers who took my pack from me.

And I refuse to let them take her from me too.

The crunch of tires comes to a halt, and the sound of the ocean and caw of morning birds is drowned out by the idling engine.

I scoop Isabelle up into my arms, keeping the blanket around her. She hums but doesn’t wake. She turns into my chest, her fingers finding and curling into a patch of fur.

Protectiveness and an emotion I can’t name spread through me with a fierce yawn.

I drop a kiss onto her forehead as I walk outside, taking her to the warm car.

They can’t take her away from me. I won’t let them.