The guards hesitated but stepped backwards, going back to their positions by the door. I lived up to my unspoken end of the bargain by withdrawing the knife. I held it lightly in my hand though, ready to stick it all the way into him the second he did something to piss me off.
I would love nothing more than to kill Peyton then and there, but I couldn’t.
You could.
Oh, that voice. That sneaky, cool, devil of a voice. My wolf could not choose a worse time to come out and play. I loved her, the animal part of me, but our relationship was strained and tenuous at best. Tenuous because I didn’t always have control over her.
Who was I kidding? I almost never had control over her.
She was a part of me, but totally her own entity. It was like living with multiple personalities, where one of those personalities was a wolf who wanted to solve all her problems by murdering people.
I sucked in a breath through my nostrils and pulled the knife farther back. It wasn’t going to stop her if she wanted to kill him. Back during my time with The Doctor she had helped me partially shift just so I could stick my hand inside his chest.
She’d do it again, and she wouldn’t wait for my permission this time.
We could end it all right here, you know.
I did know. I could cut Peyton open, gut him like a fish beneath me and crush his heart in my bare hands before those damned guards
had a chance to cross the room.
But then what?
They’d kill me.
I could deal with that if it meant Peyton was dead too. But they’d also kill Desmond, which I so wasn’t okay with.
I reminded her of our mate, the one thing both she and I could regularly agree on.
Fine.
“You could kill me,” he said, practically daring me to.
“I will. Just not yet.” Soon though. So, so soon. He would die tonight, and I’d make sure of it, but I needed to know where Desmond was first. “But you wanted to talk to me, I thought. I didn’t think you meant in bed.”
I was trying to keep things light, pretend I wasn’t on the verge of falling apart and trembling into a useless pile of goo on the floor. I had revenge to exact, only I was starting to wonder if I was smart enough to see the plan through.
“If I get off you, will you attack me again?” I asked.
“I don’t know, that sort of all depends on you.”
I couldn’t imagine how. “I’m not going to use this unless I have to.” The knife glinted between us in the warm candlelight, reminding him of its presence.
“No, naturally you’d seek to use the much larger one on your back. I thought by allowing you to keep that you might not be so inclined to assault me. Clearly I was mistaken.”
“You went first. I was playing by the rules you made up.”
“Can we dispense with the metaphors? And could you kindly get off my chest? For a small woman, you are much weightier than I gave you credit for.”
Great, he tried to kill me, and now he was calling me fat. Tonight was pretty much par for the course of my life. Insult to literal injury.
I got off him, replacing the knife in my boot. He was right. When I attacked, I wanted to cut him in half with the sword, no mucking around with piddly handheld weapons.
When I murdered him, I would do it with bloody style.
Chapter Eleven
After our little tussle, Peyton apparently no longer felt safe in close quarters with me. Why he hadn’t made the guards take my sword away yet, I still couldn’t comprehend. Maybe he figured killing me would be too easy if I was unarmed. Was his sense of bravado so intense he wanted the element of challenge to be there?