Page 30 of Blood & Throttle

She glares, jerking her arm, but my grip doesn’t budge.

"I don’t belong to anyone, asshole.”

I chuckle, dark and low. "Yeah? Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart."

Her jaw tightens, but I don’t give her room to argue. I drag her the rest of the way across the warehouse, past the ones who know better than to interfere, past the ones still watching, and wondering how much more blood I’ll spill to keep her breathing.

They’ll get their answer soon enough.

She’s pissed. I feel it in the tension of her body, the way hersteps fight against mine, but she’s moving, because she’s smart enough to know she doesn’t have a choice.

Not if she wants to stay alive.

In The Gauntlet, racers don’t protect their competition. They take them out. The fact that I claimed her—because that’s exactly what I fucking did—means every single bastard in this pit is reevaluating their bets.

And most of them don’t like it.

I feel their stares, hear the murmurs, catch the shift in posture from the ones already calculating how to use this against me.

Sienna?

She doesn’t give a single fuck.

Instead, she lifts her chin, scans the crowd with that sharp, dark-eyed defiance, and—fucking hell—blows a kiss.

Right at what’s left of Jace’s crew.

A few of them jeer, one of them spits, another mutters something I don’t catch, but it doesn’t fucking matter. The message is clear.

She’s playing with fire.

And worse? She’s enjoying it.

My grip tightens, fingers flexing around her wrist, my patience thinning with every smug little glance she throws their way. “You trying to get more of these bastards killed, Little Stray?”

She turns those wicked eyes on me, lashes low, her smirk razor-sharp. “Why? You jealous?”

I stop short and yank her in close. Our bodies nearly collide, heat crackling between us like a live wire. She gasps, just a little, just enough for me to catch it before she smothers it.

She’s reckless. Too mouthy. Too goddamn tempting.

And she’s mine.

The second I put my claim on her, the second I made it clear to every bastard in this pit that touching her meant death, she stopped belonging to herself. She became mine to protect. Mine to ruin. Mine to fucking destroy if I decide I want to.

I flick my gaze over her face, down to the smug twist of her lips, the way her chin tilts up like she isn’t the walking, talking reason I’ll be spilling more blood before the night is over.

She has no fucking idea.

“Don’t fucking test me.” My voice is low, dark, filled with something raw and territorial. “You wanna keep that pretty mouth of yours? Quit running it.”

Her chin lifts, those wild fucking eyes still taunting, still daring. “I don’t know, Riot. Seems to me like you like my mouth just fine.”

I exhale slow, sharp, biting back the instinct to do something I won’t come back from. My knuckles flex, the itch of violence crawling under my skin, demanding an outlet. I should let it go, keep walking, ignore the way she’s pushing me, pushing every goddamn button I have.

But I don’t.

Instead, I lean in, just enough to make her breath hitch, just enough to feel the way her body tenses against mine.