Page 11 of Bloody Wedding (The Order of the Owed #1)

SIX

ASHTRAY

ADRIAN

L oni opens her mouth, ready to comment on my confession, but before she can, I gesture for her to follow me through the living room. The stairs to the second floor are on the other side of it, and I tell her so.

She pauses in the middle of the space. “I get my own room.”

I glance over at her. She’s wearing a look of pure determination.

Damn it. I knew this would happen.

I arch an eyebrow at her. “You know the Order’s laws.”

“The ones that affect the Offering, yeah.” She gives her head a defiant shake. Another stray strand for her elaborate hairstyle falls into her face. With a rough brush of the back of her hand, she knocks it away. “Of course I do.”

My fingers fucking itch to see if her hair is as soft as I remember.

I flex them, then move until I’m standing in front of her. I reach out toward my wife. She wasn’t expecting it, and when she jerks her head out of my reach, the only thing that happens is that that same strand falls forward again, giving me perfect access to it.

I suck in a breath through my nose, forcing back the shudder that threatens to run through me.

God, that’s fucking soft .

Loni was always soft wherever she let me lay my hands on her. The underside of the swell of her tit. Along the side of her waist. The curve of her ass. The hollow of her throat.

The inside of her pussy.

I twist my hand, ready to trace the back of my fingers along the edge of her jaw.

She steps away. “Don’t touch me, Adrian.”

Her eyes glare at me in sudden hatred, the tendons in her neck standing out a sure sign of her restrained fury.

With a small nod, I lower my hand, a hint of an amused smirk tugging on my lips.

I can do hatred. She’s looked at me like that most of our lives, but that didn’t stop me from owning her once. Her heart… her body… she was mine when we were little more than kids.

As far as I’m concerned, she’s never stopped being mine, and now that we’re married, she’ll just have to get used to it.

I won’t let her go, and the Order says I don’t have to.

The wedding license will be signed and filed in the morning.

The Church will be ready for Wednesday mass; I’ll see to that myself.

I’ll replace the stock golden band used at every arranged wedding because my bride deserves the best. Loni deserves it, and whether she hates me now or not, I made my vow to her.

I’ll be the best husband she could ever dream of, and not even she’ll be able to stop me. Before long, I doubt she’ll want to. I won her over once. I look forward to doing it again.

Now, if she was afraid? I’d have more work to do. Indifferent? I’d be rolling up my shirtsleeves. But hatred?

I’ve missed hate sex with Loni Dougherty almost as much as I’ve missed her .

So, no, I won’t push her tonight. I want her in my bed, but I accept that that won’t be happening so soon.

After all, we have forever now.

‘Til death do us part.

Does that mean I’m going to let her tell me that I can’t touch her? I’m a cruel bastard, but I don’t ever want her to be afraid of me. So, instead of reminding her that she is my wife, I decide to play this little game of Order politics with her.

“So you know about the Offerings’ responsibilities to their Owed. Great. Then you’ll know that you get your own room if you want it, but you have to spend one night a week in my bed with me.”

There are no rules about what happens in the marriage bed; at least, not in the Order’s charter.

I’d be naive if I said there aren’t husbands who simply take what they want from their wives.

It happens, and like murder, it’s not necessarily a crime in the Order’s eyes as long as the Offering is unharmed.

Forcing your wife, leaving her in pain… that can be grounds for an intervention by Jack and his council.

Not that I would do that. When I have Loni again, it’ll be because she invited me in.

Still, I understand the rule about making it so that an Offering must spend at least one night a week in her husband’s bed.

The whole purpose of pairing up an Offering and an Owed is because the Order insists on matching bloodlines and creating future members.

They want us to fuck so that we have kids. Me? I just want Loni where she belongs.

She can’t fight me on this. Just like how a wife can claim her husband isn’t worthy of her, an Owed can give up his Offering if she doesn’t do her part. She signed her life away to save her father’s. Something tells me she’ll do the same thing if it’s threatened again.

If there’s one thing the Order of the Owed knows, it’s how to hit you where it hurts. Jack won’t threaten Loni to get her to fall in line. He’ll threaten her father.

And he definitely knows how to get me to do what’s expected of me…

When she doesn’t argue, I say, “Pick a day.”

Loni doesn’t hesitate. “Monday.”

Smart. Today is Tuesday, and while I’d put money down that Desmond purposely arranged for an unusual Tuesday wedding, believing that he could take my princess and make her his wife without me ever finding out, it makes sense that Loni would choose Monday as our night.

It’s the furthest from Tuesday, and she probably thinks she can figure a way out of this before then.

Not gonna happen. I let her get away from me once. I had every intention of waiting out the clock, going after her again once Jack couldn’t use his position to stop me—or punish Loni for my insolence—but once I knew that Desmond was trying to steal her out from under my nose?

All bets were off.

She is mine.

My bride.

My wife.

My princess…

Mine.

“Tuesday it is,” I agree. “Now, another rule. We have to have at least four meals together throughout the week. You can choose two, and I’ll choose two. Fair?”

“Breakfast counts.”

“I’m not really a morning person. I don’t do breakfast.”

A hint of triumph flashes across her face. “If you miss it, that’s not my problem.”

A hint of triumph that’s there and gone again, all while I try to hide mine.

She remembers. She doesn’t like that she does, but she remembers enough about me that I was shit until I had my morning coffee and cigarette, even back during my high school days.

She wants to have breakfast with me, though?

Oh, I’ll be there.

That thought makes me realize that I haven’t had a celebratory smoke yet. I didn’t want to do so in the car in case the smoke bothered Loni, but inside of the house, with the air purifiers running, it should be fine.

Reaching into my suit jacket pocket, I pull out my cigarette case. I pop it open, take out one of my smokes, then swap the case for the lighter engraved with my initials: AJH.

Loni watches me closely. Her pretty hazel eyes flicker from the unlit cigarette in my hand to the ashtray on my coffee table. It’s empty. Clean. Still, there’s no denying what the heavy crystal ornament with the dip in the middle for ash is.

Her nose wrinkles. “You still smoke?”

I shrug, thumb poised on the spark wheel of my lighter. “Why?”

“I thought you would’ve given it up by now.”

I cock my head, waiting for her to explain.

“What? Hasn’t anyone told you it’s not attractive to kiss an ashtray? I won’t do it. And, okay, maybe it looked cool when I was seventeen so I got over it, but lung cancer’s a thing, Adrian. So is secondhand smoke.”

Well. She’s not wrong, is she?

Most people my age vape. I got hooked at sixteen by Maggie, my father’s former Used.

Mom would be in the kitchen, directing our cook on what to make even though she refused to ever dirty her hands with household work.

It was a convenient excuse to leave the bedroom to Dad and Maggie since my father didn’t even have the decency to fuck his whore at the Court like the rest of the higher-ranked members of the Order.

Probably because Mom is Jack’s sister, and it would look bad on him if his own blood wasn’t enough to satisfy her husband’s lecherous gaze, wandering hands, and insatiable need to get off every couple of hours.

I couldn’t relate to my ice-cold mother.

Even when I started sleeping with Loni, it was more about having a part of her that no one else could than the pleasure it gave me; though, not going to lie, her pussy was like Heaven to me.

So Dad’s being a hound dog? Hell, I just went four years without sex.

I was prepared to wait another two because, fuck it, I’ve had my taste and it’s all sour compared to the woman glaring at me in a bloody wedding dress.

But Maggie…

Some Used are chosen to be a companion. A second wife, as it were, without any of the perks. The social status. The power. The protection. However, since they are chosen, they have their own benefits which is why, two hundred years later, this glorified prostitution continues in Harmony Heights.

But others? Others are basically that. They’re whores who get summonsed, get fucked, then shown the door.

My father’s and Maggie’s arrangement lasted until I was nineteen, getting ready to move, and I found her waiting for me in my bed, naked as the day she was born.

Telling me she wanted to see if I could fuck her as thoroughly as my dad, she offered herself to me—and I looked down my nose and told her I don’t do Dad’s sloppy seconds.

She had the nerve to be scandalized while I was fuming that she wanted me to stick my dick somewhere that my father’s had been for years .

He found out because that’s what we Hellers do. He made a phone call to Jamie, the woman who runs the Court, and Cecilia was being dropped off at our house within an hour.

But Maggie… if I remember anything other than those perky tits and the come-hither look on her face, it was how she left every rendezvous with my father with a cigarette on her lip.

She gave me my first smoke. I choked, and she patted my back, and I remember shaking her off. But the first time I took a puff in front of Loni and she bit down on her bottom lip like it did something to her… I’ve never stopped. I’ve never had a reason to.

Until now.

I glance down at the one in my hand. Without a word, I slip my lighter back into my jacket pocket. The unlit cigarette gets tucked behind my ear.

Her expression turns puzzled, but I don’t acknowledge it.

Instead, I say, “One question for you, Loni, then I’ll show you your room.

” I’d already offered her dinner in the car ride over, not too surprised when she shook her head, refusing it.

I’ll get some food into her tomorrow, but for now, she needs to unwind—and get the fuck out of that dress. “What do you say, princess? Deal?”

It’s obvious that she thinks I’m leading her right into a trap. The tacked-on princess doesn’t help. And, fuck, of course I am, but why not?

She nods.

“When it comes down to it, who would you rather have met at the altar this evening? Desmond? Or me?” I want nothing more than to stroke that slight furrow in her brow, but I behave myself, keeping some distance between us even as I add, “And don’t say neither because that’s not what I asked.

Given the choice between only the two of us, who would treat you better? Be a better husband to you?”

I can see the sudden anger she can’t quite hide as she mulls over my question.

Because I’m not being fair, and we both know it.

Desmond rejected her in front of the entire school. By doing so, he rejected her in front of the entire Order. So he decided a decade later to attempt to Claim her. He hurt her, and I’m well aware of it.

But the way I betrayed her was even crueler.

When I could have been honest and open about my love for her—about my addiction —I sided with the Order with the belief that, come the Claiming ceremony, I could make her mine and then she’d understand that everything I did, everything I will do, is because I’ve considered Avalon Dougherty mine from the time a freckle-faced kindergartner shared her cookie with me during snack.

At five, it was a crush.

At ten, it was an annoyance.

At fifteen, my feelings for her got me through the worst of my hormones.

At eighteen, she was mine until she wasn’t.

I’m twenty-eight now. A quarter of a century that I’ve longed for her, needed her, and she’s mine again.

My ring is on her finger. She’s in my home, and even if she’s sleeping in another room tonight, on Monday, I’ll have her right where I want her.

Right where she’s always belonged.

And I will do anything I have to, eliminate any threat in way, do whatever it takes to keep her there.

Desmond’s blood still stains her wedding dress.

I’ll have to get my hands on it to preserve it just the way it is before one of the Order’s cleaners decides to try to restore it to its pristine condition.

Fifty years from now, when the red blood is deep brown, the lace yellowed with age, I’ll look at the blood and recognize it as just another price I paid, a sacrifice I made, a promise I kept… and I’ll smile.

Just like I do now when Loni spits out, “Desmond.”

Oh, princess .

“You were a terrible liar when we were kids,” I tell her. My grin widens. “It’s nice to see that that hasn’t changed.”

Her lips part, another lie ready to spill, or maybe a denial. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I know the truth, and I’m going to take advantage of the way she’s suddenly flustered.

My hand goes to her hair again—soft, it’s so fucking soft —before slipping through the strands, palming the back of her head.

Holding her in place, I lower my mouth until it’s brushed up against hers.

She gasps, and I kiss her with everything I have in me.

Only when I’m growing light-headed from the lack of air do I release her.

That same dazed expression from before turns her beautiful face into one that dazzles me.

“What… what was that?”

“You said you won’t kiss someone who tastes like an ashtray,” I remind her. “I’m going to give up smoking for you. This is what I want in exchange.”

“I… what ?”

I’ve knocked her off-kilter. This is the only way I’m going to get her to agree, and maybe I’m a bastard, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

“To kiss my wife as my wife whenever the fuck I want to.” I press my lips to the corner of her mouth, a whisper of the kiss I just gave her. “Even if it’s just my tongue right now, I’m going to get inside of you whatever way I can.”

She sucks in a breath.

I press my finger to her lips.

“Come upstairs with me, Loni,” I murmur. “Let me show you to your room.”

I don’t give her the chance to refuse. With my hand on her upper back, I help her heft up her gown so that she doesn’t stumble on the stairs. I want so desperately to lead her into my bedroom— our bedroom—but I keep going until we’re in front of the room that I designated as hers… for now.

Dropping a kiss to the top of her head, I murmur, “Sleep well tonight, princess. Your first full day as Mrs. Heller begins tomorrow.”