I frowned, trying to think of an enemy that this ferocious creature couldn’t take on. I heard koalas could be pretty aggressive. Maybe a pack of those could take him down, especially if they were friends with a few muscly kangaroos. We’d better stay away from Australia.
“Train me up good and I’ll be strong enough to take on anything,” I suggested. “I mean, I guess there are some things I’d struggle with alone. Like if there were twelve men with baseball bats and a couple of tommy guns. Or if there was a T-rex with a taste for human blood, I don’t know if I could take him on, Niall. I’d probably try and shove a bomb up his butt, but where would I get the bomb? Do you have a bomb? Do T-rex’s even have buttholes?”
“Well now that’s a fair question,” he said, his mind immediately latching onto that as he took his phone out of his pocket. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
He slung his arm around me, drawing me down onto the couch and I snuggled closer to him as he read out what the internet man had to say on the matter. It turned out T-rexes did have buttholes. Big buttholes. And that was just the cherry on my cupcake of a perfect evening.
T he sound of Brooklyn singing drew me from my fitful sleep and I sighed as I rolled over, my body still not used to the softness of a real bed - much to my disgust. I’d been sleeping fitfully ever since returning to the main part of the house, ending up on the floor more often than I cared to admit just so that I could gain a few hours of sleep without tossing and turning my way through until morning.
I didn’t know what I was doing here anymore. I was in some kind of strange situation now where I wasn’t a prisoner in the way I had been, where I had much more freedom and hadn’t been taken for any more questioning, and yet I was still collared like a dog and controlled whenever the mood took my twisted captor.
Niall made comments about finding my treasure often enough, but he didn’t make any attempt to get me talking anymore which made no sense, especially as he claimed to want an escape from his family now more than ever.
Brooklyn’s voice travelled closer to my door and I stilled, laying on my back in the centre of my bed with one arm behind my head and the covers tossed aside.
“Ding gone!” Brooklyn called before throwing the door open regardless, dropping her shoulder against the doorframe as it swung wide and cocking her head to one side as she looked in at me.
She was wearing a pleated mini skirt in a blue tartan pattern with a pair of knee-high black socks and a strappy black cami. Just the sight of her was enough to make blood start running towards my dick as I took her in.
“It’s early and no one wants to play with me,” she huffed, blowing a lock of dark hair out of her eyes before letting it flutter back down to cover them once more.
“And what is it that you want to play?” I asked, pushing myself to sit up as she took a step into the room, knowing I couldn’t allow that. If she closed that door behind her then we would be all too alone in here and after a fitful night of reliving the darkness of my past, I didn’t trust myself with her.
That was the one thing about this taste of freedom which I resented. With this greater range of movement available to me and so many more opportunities for me to get this sweet creature to myself, I was at much greater risk of seeing the worst in me break free and do something I couldn’t come back from.
When Niall had left me alone with her while he’d been trapped in his own darkness, it had been all that I could do to make sure that I didn’t touch her at all, keeping my distance and encouraging her to sleep in the rooms which my collar kept me out of just so that I could be certain I wouldn’t lose control with her.
But the longer I fought the desire I felt for her, the more potent it seemed to grow. The desire in me becoming akin to a need just in the same way as I needed oxygen, water and food to sustain me, I was beginning to rely on a dose of her far more often than I should have to.
But all of this restraint, all of this watching and waiting was building to a breaking point and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep well again until I managed to give the demon in me at least a little of what it needed.
And that need was all for her.
“Hide and seek?” she suggested. “It’s raining out, so we could hide in puddles, or behind the raindrops, or down the storm drain, or-”
“Perhaps we should just play in the house, chica loca?” I suggested, the sound of the storm outside battering against my window beyond the curtains.
“Boo,” she complained and I closed the distance between us in three long strides, taking her jaw in my grip and making her look at me.
“No petulance,” I warned, which only served to make her bottom lip push out and I leaned in, taking it between my teeth and tugging just hard enough to serve her a small taste of pain for her disobedience before releasing it just as fast.
Her eyes widened and she sucked her lip into her mouth, tasting the small hurt and blinking at me in surprise.
“I made a game out of hunting people once,” I told her, lowering my voice and shifting closer to her once more, the space between us electrifying as it got smaller. “No one ever survived me finding them before you.”
“What do I get if I win?” she asked, tipping her head back to look up at me as I crowded her in, dominating her space.
“You won’t win,” I assured her.
“So what do I get if I lose?”
I let my gaze travel down the length of her body, licking my lips as I considered that. I’d been holding back with her so much that it felt like its own kind of torture and I was more than ready to alleviate some of that need in my flesh.
“Is Niall awake?” I asked her, making her blink in surprise at the shift in the conversation but she nodded all the same.
“He’s doing more research on the judge,” she said with a huff. “He says this one is a planner. It’s super boring. Oh, and he was watching the news too and going on about his nephew being a right sneaky little motherfucker because of some vaccine thingy.”
“A vaccine?” I asked, picking out the relevant part of that story as she shrugged, making it clear she had no interest in that which meant I needed answers on it elsewhere.
“He says I have to have my lessons later because he’s doing the boring man things and sometimes, he has to be the boring man even though it makes him want to blow his brains out.”
I nodded thoughtfully. In the last few weeks, he had been focused on training Brooklyn as often as he could, wrestling with her and showing her how to fight with various weapons, he’d even tried to get me to join in and though I’d refused to pit myself against her, I had gotten into a few brawls with him which had helped me work through some of the rage inside me. Not that it came close to paying him back for the months of torture I’d endured at his mercy, but at least I could glean some sort of satisfaction from feeling my knuckles crack against his smirking face.
Brooklyn had been having lessons of her own too, phone calls with some prostitute who was teaching her all kinds of tricks to manipulate men and I had to admit that she was getting better and better at implementing those moves, wrapping the three men in this house around her little finger on an ever-tightening leash. Although maybe that wasn’t a trick at all. Maybe it was just her.
“Go hide then, mi sol,” I said, giving her a little push to get her moving.