Page 77 of Violent Pawn

“Fucking people need to go away. This isn’t over,” Nero murmurs a threat more than a promise as he snatches my hand and drags me to his side. We follow Serafina and Lev to the others. “You’re sitting beside me, and that isn’t a request. I’ll change the seating chart myself if I have to.”

Which pretty much is what happens. The abrupt switch places Dimitri on Zeno’s left where Nero should have sat, so I’m between him and Vanessa now.

Dinner feels like a bed of knives. His hand rests on my knee, occasionally finding the slit in my dress to stroke his fingertips up and down my thigh. Focusing on anything the others are talking about is lost in a haze of desire soon expanding into utter need on the verge of controlling me.

“Stop,” I hiss beneath my breath.

He ignores me, curling a finger around my panties but not seeking the warmth that has me rocking into his touch. He smirks around a glass and talks to Dimitri across the table while I pretend I’m not on the verge of falling.

Crumbling.

Into the abyss there’d be no coming back from.

Where my trust for Nero demands being freed.

“What’s going on with you two?” Lev nudges my side after dinner breaks up and guests start leaving. We’re trailing the others out of the dining room when Lev basically pushes Nero out of the way to take his place.

“Nothing.”

He scoffs. “You couldn’t be less obvious if you tried.”

“Says the guy who all but announced his relationship with Sera in front of everyone when you shouldn’t have been doing shit all with her.” The memory is still as funny now as it was hilariously shocking back then.

“Stop deflecting. If I noticed, everyone else has too. What’s changed?”

I feel the pressure, the tingle on my neck associated with one person, and he’s easy to spot across the room. “He’s not the same.”

Lev blinks in a strange understanding before turning to locate Serafina. “Yeah, I get that. Maybe he’ll be good for you. Maybe it’s worth letting one person in.”

“She’s changing you too fast. I can’t keep up. Go back to not being perceptive about this stuff.”

He breaks off when he’s forced to say goodbye to one of the guests who strike him up in a conversation about something tech-related. I take the opportunity to escape the crowd and down the hallway, towards the stairs and end this night entirely.

The floor claps with leather shoes, and only one person would be paying me enough attention to have noticed me leave. He catches up, hand melding around my wrist to haul me backwards.

“We weren’t finished speaking.”

“We weren’t,” I agree, my lungs constricting with the words about to come from my mouth. Then again, Nero regularly makes me breathless, so it’s appropriate the idea of more does as well. “We were saying something about jealousy and always getting interrupted.”

His cheek brushes mine, followed by his lips forming the same path. “What’s the solution?”

I turn my head slightly, voice low enough it’s nearly inaudible. “That we go to my bedroom, and I prove how much I’ve come to trust you.”

38

NERO

The moment Anastasia shuts her door, I have her pinned to it, my mouth fused on hers while reaching for the little string that’ll undo this entire debacle she’s wearing. It’s sexy as hell, but I’m sick of seeing her in it. Seeing other men see her in it. One little tug of that string, and the dress will be a useless sea of red around her feet.

I rub my hands over her hips, feeling her. Feeling what so many of the assholes downstairs fantasized about. I watched her enough to know I wasn’t the only one. I was prepared to slaughter any man she looked twice at, not that I believed she would. Anastasia is a tightly sealed lock with a very specific combination code to reveal what’s beneath the surface. She doesn’t give away the code, but makes a person work for it.

I’m lucky enough that she’s allowed me to figure that code out. Hell, they should be grateful they weren’t given the opportunity to try, or else that possessiveness she claims to be uncomfortable over would rear its bloody head and start taking them out. It’s good she can’t see inside my head and what she’s making me feel.

I move my mouth from hers, tracing a line down her cheek to her jaw where I whisper in her ear, “Yes or no?” I won’t survive if she says a two-letter word rather than the three, but I’ll respect it.

“Yes.”

My teeth scrape over her pulse, and she releases a low noise. I yank that string until the dress comes undone. A quick jerk until it’s pooled around her feet. I trace a finger over her hip, over the line of her panties and around her hip, but go no further—yet.