Page 149 of The Bonding Games: Part 1

The five of them appear horrified.

Then everyone starts talking at once, their voices overlapping:

“Of course not, Havoc! I’d never call you a slug—”

“Vengeance, no part of you reminds me of a slimy creature, nor have I ever compared you to one—”

“Oh gods! I do not think of you as a slug, Ezla! I would never—”

“Love, I promise you, you look nothing like one and are far more impressive—”

“THE POINT IS WE’D ALL LOVE YOU NO MATTER WHAT!” Tiger’s voice rises above all the others’, and the four of them fall silent. “That’s all we were trying to say.”

No one refutes his claim, and something writhes within me.

Must be nausea.

I narrow my eyes to slits. “I did not need to know that. I do not care.”

Tiger pouts, and a heavy silence envelopes the room.

I realise then that sometime during this conversation, the hand has stopped moving in my hair.

Very, very slowly, I slide a menacing glare to my right.

Rolling his lips in, Scotty does a deplorable job of hiding his amusement as he gets back to stroking my head, palm smoothing over it, fingers running through my dark strands.

I glare harder to make sure I get the point across that his touch is not that good and I am not enjoying it or his attention.

A moan leaves me when fingers dig into the arches of my feet.

I will kill them all for reducing me to this.

Yet when I imagine sawing through the bone and tissue of any one of these men, it does not appeal to me the way it previously has.

I still despise them.

Cooper clears his throat, and the lids that had just closed to bathe in my deserved treatment slide open again to allow my glower to reach full effectiveness as I pin vitriolic eyes on him.

He does not heed the warning.

“We need to talk, HC.”

I hiss viciously and shoot upright in an instant, any notions of peace evaporating—

My wrath falters when I catch sight of one of the obsidian bedside tables, the top of which holds wet flannels, Avritabs, and water, as well as some of the cinnamon-scented oil they had used on me previously, like they had been fully prepared to give me another massage if I’d so desired. But I shake off anything the discovery dredges up from the blackened cavity of my chest and growl out the logical thoughts this behaviour of theirs brings to me lowly, “You did this for information. To uncover my secrets. I will destroy you.”

“No!” Alby cries when I start to get up.

For him, I pause.

How weak of me.

He is my biggest problem when it comes to . . . softening me. Only a smidge, but I am not oblivious to it. I do not choose favourites—I would have to take a liking to at least one of them for that—but they all have different . . . effects on me, I would say, though it does not please me to admit, and that is his. They each bring something different to the equation, and Alby is . . . safest.

Yet even then, I must remember to remain on guard at all times.

“N-no, please . . . d-don’t. Don’t go.” I tense when long fingers wrap around my calf, and he immediately snatches his hand away.