“I asked you a question, and you will answer me, girl,” he seethed. “When Lucas asks you a question, you answer. You do not make demands.” He paused for only a second before repeating, “Do you understand?”
I nodded numbly as the room filled with my cries. I choked over my tears and thrashed in the alcove when he suddenly cupped my sex, one of his fingers sliding into my folds just as roughly as he’d touched the rest of me.
“Stop!”
“This no long—”
Long ago memories flashed, and I screamed, “Don’t touch me!”
“Briar!”
My head snapped up at the loud boom I would have sworn shook the house, and my heart raced. More tears pricked at my eyes—these different, these from the intense relief that pounded through me.
“Briar!” Lucas yelled again, closer.
William stepped back leisurely to stand silently a few feet away from me, looking at the closed doorway to my room expectantly. He almost seemed bored as he waited.
The devil, however, was anything but bored. His dark eyes were murderous when he charged into the room, but the look fell when he saw me being forced to stand in the alcove.
“Briar,” he whispered, and quickly closed the distance between us. His hands went to my face first then my neck as his eyes searched my face wildly. “Are you okay? It’s going to be okay,” he assured me before I could answer.
“She needed to learn,” William said from behind Lucas, and like a switch had been flipped, the murderous look was back in his eyes.
Lucas wrapped an arm around my waist to lift me off the ground as he untied the belt, and a muscle in his jaw popped while his nostrils flared. “This is too far; this is outside the rules. She’s not yours to fucking touch,” he hissed. His eyes never left my face, but it was clear his words weren’t meant for me.
As soon as my hands were free, I let my arms fall like dead weights around Lucas’s neck, curled my legs around his body, and sobbed against his white button-down shirt.
“It’s okay.” He ran his hand over my hair soothingly while he walked me back across the room. “It’s okay.” William began talking, but Lucas gritted out, “Enough!”
William continued on smugly. “It worked. You are welcome. She’s progressed greatly today if she’s also clinging to you rather than trying to get away.”
When Lucas set me on the bed, his face was frozen in a terrifying mask of rage, and it didn’t fit how gently he cupped my cheek. “Cover yourself.”
I scrambled to pull the sheet over my body and flinched when Lucas turned and punched William in the jaw. Just as William started to stumble away from the force of Lucas’s fist, Lucas grabbed him by the collar and forced him closer until they were face to face.
Other than working his jaw a couple times, William showed no signs of having been hit. His breathing remained calm and face impassive.
Lucas looked as if he was trying to talk himself out of doing it again, or more.
“You do not have the right to touch or teach what is mine,” Lucas snapped.
“Ah ah, I didn’t teach,” William said, attempting a smug grin. “There are rules after all, Lucas. I merely . . . bent her so she would be more willing to comply to you.”
Lucas’s face became unreadable. The dark tension in the room became suffocating as he silently raged.
“If you were anyone less, you know exactly how this would end,” he seethed in a calm, terrifying tone. “Now leave my home and don’t come back unless you’re invited. And if you ever touch Briar, or any of my girls, again, know that I will end this, and it will be with a heartbeat on your door.”
I wasn’t on the receiving end of those threats, but I was shaking from them. Most of the words meant nothing to me—didn’t make sense—but it was his voice and the look in his eyes. Detached, dark, lethal.
He is darkness; he is the devil.
William maintained his aloof expression as he shoved away from Lucas. “I will expect your thanks soon,” he called out as he walked from the room.
My mind was racing, trying to decipher the cryptic threat. “What do you mean, a heartbeat on his door?” I whispered softly when William left.
Lucas paused on his way back to me, continued, and shook his head. “Not today, Briar.”
From some of the horrific images that came to mind, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know, so I didn’t push for him to explain. I just clung to his forearms when he held my face in his hands.