Chapter 146

The Predator

I had never felt this way.

The weight of her felt like a thousand sins stacked on my chest. Warm. Fragile. Unforgivingly mine. She slept soundly, her breaths soft and steady against my skin, as though I hadn’t just destroyed her a hundred times over. As though I wasn’t the very thing that should have haunted her dreams.

My fingers moved on their own like the man things had another mind, tracing the curve of her delicate shoulder and the line of her seductive collarbone. Such delicate body for a soul so maddeningly defiant. She was chaos wrapped in quiet like a fucking storm in stillness, and I hated her for it. Hated how she disarmed me without even trying, how she peeled me open and made me feel—feel—things I’d spent my life burying six feet under.

“Fuck,” I whispered under my breath. Her words still echoed in my head, carving trenches into a mind that had no room for guilt. ‘You’ve already had me…even the pieces you broke.’