On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (21 page)

“You leave me with lumpy milk and sit up here sipping on hot chocolate?” It even had marshmallows melted on top.

“Hey, don’t give me shit about the lumpy milk in my fridge. You could have had a kitchen filled with food, but instead you chose a living room filled with electronics. Deal with it.”

He drank what remained of her hot chocolate and handed the cup back to her before turning toward Randy. “I need food.”

Randy slanted a confused glance at Sabrina, and she shrugged.

Zeus felt the vibration in his chest again. He was hungry and horny and still felt
something
inside of him calling out for Sabrina, yet they thought they would silently communicate about him when…

“Damn,” Randy muttered.

Zeus realized Randy was focusing on the blade spinning through Zeus’s fingers.

Sabrina’s hand touched the center of his chest, and the blade slowed. Her hand was warm. He looked out the window but mentally followed her hand as it trailed down his abdomen to his hips, fingertips hiding just beneath the waistband of his jeans. He leaned his head toward hers, breathing in and liking her new scent. It was a mixture of him and her and sex. He pulled her fully against him, his dick straining to find a way back inside her.

“I’m hungry,” he ground out.

He felt her smile against his chest. “I thought you wanted Randy to take care of that for you.”

Zeus pulled away from Sabrina and glared at Randy, who shrugged. “You did ask me to feed you. I’ve got enough for a few mouthfuls.”

Zeus grimaced while Sabrina tried to smother her laughter against his chest.

“There are leftovers in the kitchen,” Sabrina told him as she pulled away.

He reached out to grab her again but was distracted by the sight of Bride walking into the room with a piece of link sausage dangling from her mouth like a limp dick. Images of times he’d been threatened by some pervert trying to force that reality on him as a child filtered through his mind. The memories triggered a primal rage, and just like that, the need to hurt something, to kill, had his fingers dancing.

“YOU WANT SAUSAGE? Home-fried potatoes? Food’s on the stove. Big Country cooks like his mama at least
tried
to raise him right,” Sabrina said.

Her words were pressured, and she tried to laugh, only to have it come out as a pathetic titter. What she’d said was true enough; Big Country had cooked up a storm in Randy’s kitchen, but she’d been rambling, attempting to distract Zeus from whatever darkness had descended upon him.

Too quick to comprehend, the dangerously sexual, socially intolerant, slightly crazy, and highly irritating man had reverted back to the vacant-eyed demon that had saturated her in other men’s blood while she was on the warehouse floor.

“Gotta hunt. Appease this hunger.” Zeus’s mouth cocked to the side as if he’d made a joke. A joke that came from a world where suffering and humor were indistinguishable.

She looked over at Bride, who watched Zeus in an under-eyed way that reminded Sabrina of an animal determining if it was going to fight or flee. Randy simply looked confused by the sudden tension in room, but she saw his body react unconsciously, adjusting to a combat stance.

Sabrina grabbed Zeus’s wrist, the one not brandishing a weapon, and pulled him toward the door. “Hey, Randy. We need to take care of a few things. See you later.”

She pulled Zeus down the hall and stairs and back into her apartment, closing the door and locking it behind her, as if
that
would be the thing that kept him from going out and killing somebody.

He watched her silently, and she watched him, her gaze drawn to the blade playing through his fingers. His body wasn’t tense, actually seemed loose, but the intensity of his gaze cut through her. Sabrina felt both terrified and euphoric as she realized Zeus’s blades helped him harness and guide the violence built up inside of him. If the blades danced through his fingers, they weren’t dancing over someone’s—namely her—flesh.

Sabrina took a step closer to him and placed her hand on his chest, over his heart, giving him something to feel besides the need that drove him to kill. She felt his heartbeat, his heat beneath the cool T-shirt. She also felt him flinch from the contact, as if her hand burned. She smiled when he chuffed out a breath. It was as if he were a beast confused about what to do with its suicidal prey.

Sabrina knew she wasn’t suicidal. As bad as life had been, it was her life, and she would stand toe-to-toe with the devil himself to keep it. For the hundredth time she wished Sam had held on to the same determination, but her sister hadn’t.

“I can’t die today, you know. You promised you’d teach me how to use a blade to defend myself.”

He frowned. He hadn’t actually promised her that, but she wasn’t above lying if it kept her alive a little longer. “I’m hungry, Bree,” he said, stepping closer, close enough for her to feel the hard ridge of muscle press against her abdomen.

The wetness pooling between her legs was her body’s initial response to his declaration. It was a shame, but her body had been conditioned to him faster than Pavlov’s dogs had been to the bell. She wouldn’t give him her life, but she would gladly give him her body again.

Randy was right. She was a nasty, slutty bitch. It wasn’t a title she usually wore, but she’d wear it with a crown when it came to Zeus.

She rubbed against the hardness of his shaft and heard Zeus draw in air as if he was a man tortured.

“Am I making things hard for you, big man?” she asked as she slipped her hand down his chest and molded it against his straining penis. She allowed her head to fall forward, and rested it where her hand had been near his heart. “I’m sorry, Zeus. I don’t mean to make things hard for you, but people have always told me how difficult I can make things.” She tweaked the head of his penis, bound beneath the taut material of his jeans. He groaned, and she smiled, rubbing her cheek against his chest.

She
so
meant to make things hard for him.

His fingers fisted in her hair, pulling her head back and exposing her neck. He held her head immobile as his mercurial eyes consumed every pore, every angle, every emotion that had ever left an imprint on her face.

Sabrina inhaled, dragging his scent deep into her, imagining she imprinted her essence onto his DNA as she exhaled. Zeus’s mouth brushed over hers more gently than she’d imagined his need would ever allow. She groaned, tweaking his tip again, and cried out as the beast rose up and tried to devour her.

Zeus bent her backward with the force of his kiss, his forearm a steel band of support at her lower back. He lifted her as he straightened, and she wrapped her legs around his hips. The rub of his jean-clad erection against her clit caused another guttural moan to escape as she rode the length of him. He pressed her back against the front door and ground into her, lifting one of her legs and draping it over his shoulder. If not for the higher powers of yoga, he probably would have snapped every bone in her body with the way he flung her limbs around.

Hands tugged at her shirt. She felt her breasts exposed to the cool air only for an instant before hands and lips fastened on them. She cried out as she bucked against him, begging him to free himself and fill her.

Not until Zeus loosed her nipple and growled did she realize the jarring vibration at her back was someone knocking,
banging
, on her door. Zeus hit the door one time. Hard. She had to turn to make sure he didn’t leave a hole.

Sabrina scrambled to pull the T-shirt back down over around her waist while Zeus continued to grind against her.

She slid her leg down so it hung in the crook of Zeus’s elbow and unwound her other leg from around his hip and let it dangle toward the floor. Zeus’s fist tightened against the back of her head, angling it to the side so he could suck her neck. Her vagina fought to take what Zeus had to offer, but her mind forced her to reach up and spread her hands across each side of Zeus’s face as she pushed his head away. She rained kisses over his eyes, his cheeks, forehead, then his mouth, coaxing him into a languid kiss. She pulled away and stroked her thumbs over his eyebrows and cheekbones.

Zeus relaxed into her touch, though she could see he hadn’t fully released the reins of his need.

Another round of knocking had him cursing and reaching for the doorknob.

“Wait. Zeus, wait. Go to the kitchen. I promise. Let me handle this, and I’ll come in there and feed every craving you need fed.” She kissed him in the spot of his third eye, and he eased back.

“Two minutes. You got two minutes, Bree. If you’re not on the counter straddling me as you place food in my mouth, someone’s going to get hurt. And it won’t be me…or you.”

That meant Randy or Bride or whichever Brood member was at her door owed her their life. She watched Zeus walk to the back of the apartment before she unlocked and opened the door.

Her intention of teasing the person in the hall vanished as she looked into the vibrant blue eyes of an expensively dressed stranger. Her first thought was that one of Randy’s new boy toys had gotten lost. But why did he look familiar? Maybe it was an intensity in his eyes, which rivaled Zeus’s. She took a step back.

“Sabrina.” The stranger smiled at her with so much sincerity and kindness she couldn’t decide if she should return it or run. When she noticed the two large, well-dressed men behind the man standing in front of her, instinct urged her to run. She couldn’t move.

“You are more beautiful than I remember. It feels like I’ve been searching for you half my lifetime.”

A wrongness settled over her. Not just with the situation, but with him. He felt familiar, and he felt…
wrong
, despite the pretty packaging. She took a step back, confused about why she was being so passive. There were killers after her, and for some reason she couldn’t find her voice, couldn’t react to the man who appeared to be so captivated by her.

Then it clicked.

“Kragen,” she said.

Rapist, torturer, killer of over a dozen women who all looked disturbingly like her. The man who’d had her beaten and kidnapped, possibly with every intention of raping, torturing, and killing her also.

She took another step back, and they followed her into her apartment. She wanted to call out to Zeus, but she knew with every fiber of her being the two men behind Kragen were strapped with guns. She didn’t want to be taken, but more importantly, she didn’t want Zeus shot or hurt if he charged in and tried to protect her. Taking a deep breath, she regrouped and did what she had learned to do all her life—talk until she could find the best opportunity to escape.

“You remember me.” Kragen’s smile was all things pleased.

“You look familiar, but no, I don’t remember you. I lost some of my memory a while ago, but I remember the men who abducted me saying the name Kragen. They described you as the man who’d hired them. A pretty boy playing with daddy’s money, they said. You’re here, obviously a wealthy man, obviously attractive. It stands to reason you’re the man that paid them to kidnap me.”

She watched the play of emotions on his face as she spoke. In the end his mouth settled in an indulgent smile.

“You were always my smart girl, weren’t you, Sabrina? It was one of the qualities that kept you burning through my blood all these years.”

He took a step toward her, and she took another step back, racking her brain for some sign that she had any history with this man. Sometimes she didn’t remember things, but that was singularly related to the details of some physical altercation she had with Ernesto.

“If we have such a wonderful history, why have me kidnapped? Why have me beaten nearly to death?”

She didn’t think the sadness and grief he displayed was fake or contrived, but what she did know was he was the closest thing to evil she had ever come into contact with. But it didn’t matter that his expression seemed to beg her forgiveness.

“I made an error in judgment. I gave men I didn’t know or trust the job of securing you until I arrived. They weren’t supposed to hurt you. I promise. If they weren’t dead already, I would take pleasure in allowing you to watch them die.”

Yeah, well, she’d already watched, and it hadn’t been a pleasure at all.

“So, um, the cops were telling the truth when they said my abductors were dead? I hadn’t seen anything on the news.”

“They were alive when you last saw them?”

She nodded, sticking to the story she’d told the cops.

“The only way I was able to get away was because they left me by myself. When I came to, I escaped from a window. I never looked back.”

“I’m glad you made it out alive. I never would have forgiven myself if I had lost you to their incompetence.”

“Lucky for all involved—”

A pan clattered in the kitchen. Sabrina flinched.

“Ah, the bodyguard, I presume?” The man, Kragen, looked over to the bigger of the two men, who reached inside his coat as he trod softly down the hall in the direction of the kitchen.

Zeus!
she screamed in her head. When her mouth tried to follow suit, Kragen’s hand covered it as his other arm fastened around her like a manacle.

“No. I don’t want you to see any more violence,” he said.

Then stop bringing violence into my life, she thought. Her heartbeat was an erratic staccato, a silent rhythm that called out for Zeus to protect himself.

She heard a struggle. Waited. The silence that descended was almost as deafening as the gunshot that followed.

“Come, Sabrina. It’s time I take you where you belong.”

She fought for her life then. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to run, not away but down the hall, to the kitchen. She’d always been about self-preservation, but she needed to get to Zeus.

Behind her, behind Kragen, there was a metallic
click, click
. Sabrina craned her head around to see a gun barrel pressed against Kragen’s temple. Bride reached inside the coat of the other burly guy as Kragen released Sabrina.

Bride palmed the other man’s gun and motioned for him to get down on his knees. Good ol’ silent Bride.

“And I thought we’d taken care of your guard detail,” Kragen said.