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CHAPTER EIGHT

STONE

“Wh-what are you talking about?” Zuri stepped away from me, her fingers trembling and her lips quivering as she tried to enunciate more and more words. “Stone … whose ashes are these?”

“Your ex-packmates.”

She doubled over onto her knees and puked up her breakfast all over the ground, clutching her stomach. When she lifted her head to look back up at me, she dropped her gaze to the bowl of ashes and then puked again.

“Y-you killed them?”

“No. I locked them in a building and burned it. If I had killed them, I would’ve brought you their heads, too, but … we’re using the skulls for other matters.” That she probably doesn’t want to know about.

Once she finally came back up for air, she rolled over onto her ass and glared up at me through teary eyes. “Sophia was my manager!” Zuri shrieked. “And one of my friends. How could you do such a thing?!”

“Sophia was just as much your bully as they all were,” I growled through my canines.

“She was nice to me,” my mate argued.

But she had become so blind to it all, so used to the constant bullying from her packmates that she accepted any niceness. She couldn’t see how fake Sophia was, couldn’t understand that no matter how bad it had gotten, Sophia would’ve never fired Zuri’s sister.

She hadn’t cared about Zuri. Plain and simple.

“Being nice doesn’t mean she was your friend,” I said. “And it certainly doesn’t mean that she deserved to live. She burned, just like the rest of them, and she died like all the men, women, demons, wolves, vampires that had been liars and cheats before her.”

“But—”

“No friend could do that to you. And I won’t allow anyone to treat you that way,” I growled, refusing to give Zuri any less than what she deserved.

Fucking kindness—not being bullied and spit on, kicked and name-called—was what every creature deserved.

Not the shitty packmates that had called themselves Zuri’s friends.

I crouched down in front of her. “Do you want to know why everyone fears me?”

“Because you’re fucking psychotic!” she shrieked, scrambling back on her ass until she hit a wall. She wrapped her arms around her body and glared harder at me. “Trying to get me to bathe in my pack’s ashes.”

“Ex-pack,” I corrected. “People who didn’t give a fuck about you.” I moved closer to her and grabbed her throat, tilting her head up so she stared up at me. “No, sweetheart. It’s because I’m not afraid to do anything for the people— for the woman —I love.”

“You don’t love me,” she said. “You don’t even know me.”

“I don’t love you now, but I will.”

She shuffled to her feet, then backed away from me and stretched out her arm toward me, holding up her hand. “N-no, you … we … you can’t love me. I’m not a monster like you. I can’t be mated to someone who kills people for fun.”

“I don’t kill people for fun,” I said. “I kill them because they don’t deserve to live.”

“I’ve heard of your plans to rule an empire of wolves,” she whispered, staring at me through large, tear-filled eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. “Is it true? Do you plan on eliminating everyone who stands in your path, like you did with my … my family?”

I growled at the word because that had been no family, but responded with, “Yes.”

While I had been blind with rage late last night, a different emotion that I had never felt before built higher and higher inside me. I dipped my head into the crook of her neck, breathing in the intoxicating scent of my mate.

“And I’m going to give you the fucking world,” I growled. “You’re mine.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “Stone?—”

“Say it.”

“No.”

I drew my canines across her neck and gently pricked them into her skin, not enough to mark her yet, but enough for her to know that she was mine. That there was no escaping this. No escaping me.

“Say it,” I growled.

“N—”

“Don’t make me order you again, mate. Or I’ll drag you back up to that bedroom and show you who you belong to,” I snarled.

“I’ll make you beg for me on your knees with my cock down your pretty little throat and your eyes filled with tears.

So, fucking say it.” I tightened my hand around her throat and stared down into those pretty brown eyes. “You know I will?—”

“I’m yours,” she finally breathed.

“Forever,” I growled.