My strength.
I stood away from him, my shoulders heaving with the force of my haggard breaths.
With the force of the hope.
With the force of my love.
With the force of this conviction.
Jarek slowly spun me around. Every line in his face was contorted in disgust and loathing. As if I were the one who should be ashamed. It was a face that would be handsome if I didn’t know every gruesome thought behind it.
“Such a whore. You’ve always been, haven’t you? Fucking the one you don’t belong to?” The look on his face intended to hurt. The bastard thought I should feel disgraced?
Screw him.
Lifting my chin, I hissed the words, “It seems you’re mistaken, Jarek. I don’t belong to you. Logan won me, remember? Because of your pathetic bet? Do you remember that? How pathetic you were in the basement? All those men who saw you sweating? Out of control?”
I let the insult wind into my voice. I knew it was a provocation. I knew it would piss him off.
I wanted to.
I wanted to make him feel small and tiny and insignificant.
The way he’d made me feel my entire life.
So I pushed it. “But don’t worry. Logan has takengoodcare of me.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing,” he spat as a furious hand cracked across my face.
The sharp sting burned my cheek, but I gritted my teeth and refused to cry out. Instead, I lifted my chin again and prepared to fight it out because I was finished being forced into who I didn’t want to be.
That was right when a gun cocked at the back of Jarek’s head.
The ground tremored beneath my feet.
My dark defender.
“The lady is right.”
Logan’s voice was a blade.
Chaos.
My soul’s perfection.
Fury rustled through Jarek’s being in a livid tremor. It rolled through him, head to toe.
Logan grabbed him by the back of the neck the same way as Jarek had grabbed me. He angled him down, bending him at the waist so Jarek was turned away from him.
Completely at his mercy.
I didn’t feel a lot of that resonating from Logan right then.
Logan kept the gun pressed to the base of his skull as he leaned over him, and the warning ground from his mouth, “You can’t stand losing, can you, Jarek? It’s an embarrassment, you know, someone who can’t accept that they’ve lost. That they’re less. That what they want doesn’t count because in the end, they don’t count for anything.”
It was cool, hard rage.
Logan’s scorn was barely held in the violence I could almost visibly see illuminated on his flesh.