The Knight (Endgame #2)(19)

I’m acting on pure survival. Fight-or-flight.

My room is an empty shell, an architectural dig into the time before.

The time when I was still innocent.

Footsteps follow me—closer, closer.

I duck into the closet and hold my breath. This is how I played hide-and-seek with my mother, shaking with nervousness as I heard her voice. Where is my little Avery? She’s quiet as a mouse!

And then he’s in my room. He stills.

“Where could you be?” comes his liquid voice. “So small. So sweet. I can almost smell you.”

Because he’s a wild animal made to look human. A predator living among prey.

Anxiety clenches my throat. It’s a struggle not to move, but even flat against the wall my heart beats wildly. He must hear it. He must feel it vibrating through the house.

He crosses the room with a leisurely stride, hitting that board that creaks ever since I spilled a glass of water. I can envision him looking out the window at the unkempt lawn.

“The chase makes it better, don’t you think? If I touched you, would you be wet?”

No. It’s impossible.

Except there’s heat coursing through me. Anticipation. And my body can’t seem to tell the difference between fear and arousal. Or maybe they’re the same thing, mixed together by the sexual awakening of the auction. Maybe I only get turned on by a man owning me.

The doorknob turns. The closet door opens, letting in a sliver of light.

He steps inside, blocking the light with his body. “Found you,” he murmurs.

“You never really let me go.”

A low laugh is the only response.

Because it’s the truth. He toys with me, letting me run only to pick me up by my tail. It’s a twisted game, meant to amuse him, meant to scare me.

Mr. Miller thought you might like to spend time in the house before the auction.

This is why he had the limo pick me up early. Not kindness. Not understanding. Pure sexual power, made colder by the fact that we’re in the house he took from me.

It’s already wrong to be here with him in my family’s legacy. Already humiliating to be hunted like an animal. That’s what he means to do—break my spirit. Twist my love.

Even knowing I’ll lose, I’m not ready to give in.

I tilt my face to his, lips inches away. He wants my capture more than my surrender, so I let him cover the distance. His lips claim mine in a bruising statement. He invades me with tongue and teeth, with force and electric pleasure—for five seconds. Four. Three, two, one.

And then I bite down, hard enough to taste the copper of his blood, brutal enough to hear him grunt in response. It’s the follow-up knee between his legs that makes him stumble back. The powerful force of him thuds against the wall, and I know I only have seconds of freedom.

Then I’m flying down the stairs, through empty halls and echoing wood floors. My breath comes in rasping, frantic gulps as I burst into the large living room, the grand fireplace almost naked without my mother’s portrait above it.

It’s in that moment, the half heartbeat where I mourn the loss of her picture, that Gabriel slams into me from behind. Then I’m pressed against hand-carved scrolls, marble cold against my cheek, patterns sharp against my body. Without thinking my hands go to the mantel, holding me steady while he presses from behind.

He’s breathing hard too, though it seems more like excitement than tiredness. Especially with the hard length imprinted against my ass. “You drew blood,” he murmurs, almost with wonder.

I jerk against him, but his hold is too secure this time. “Good.”

Heat. Softness. The faint edge of teeth. That’s how his mouth registers against my neck. Sensation and pleasure and pain as he works his way to the curve of my shoulder.

“No one fights me like you,” he says, his hand flat against my stomach.

My breath catches. It’s a threat, that hand. The one safe place on the front of my body. Any higher and he’ll touch my breasts. Lower and he’ll reach between my legs.

“Will you fight me?” he murmurs.

It only makes him harder, hotter. It only makes the win more satisfying for him.

There are some things a body will do on its own—like taking a deep breath at the bottom of the ocean, knowing you’ll only breathe in water but having to try anyway. “Yes.”

“Thank fuck,” he says, his voice thick.

He turns me around, his mouth fusing to mine, stealing my breath. I don’t have a chance to push him away; he’s already inside me. His mouth bites at mine, hard enough to make me jolt, sweet enough to make my nipples pebble beneath my bra.

I push up against his chest, an implacable wall as hard as the brick behind me. “Wait.”

“There’s no time,” he breathes, his lips working down my throat. “They’ll start arriving any second now.”

My eyes close in tacit denial. “No.”

“No?” He dips lower, into the hollow of my neck. “I wish I could taste your cunt. Wish I could lick you—here.”

The nudge of his hips pushes something hot and hard against me. Between my legs. We fit together perfectly. “Not here.”

“Later,” he promises.

Then his mouth is on mine again, his body pressed against me—the broad plain of his chest, the bunch of his abs, the ridge where his body demands entry. So much need coiled in him, so many ways he could relieve it, but all he does is kiss me.