His Trouble Maker

Chapter 135

JESSICA

“Ah!”

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I hit the concrete hard, knees first, cheek after–his fingers still clutching the root of my hair like he’s not ready to let go, like the floor isn’t enough, like I belong beneath it. I can still smell the cages on me–hot metal, heat–rutted fur, shit and bile and birth, and something underneath all that, something that smells like

me.

I don’t scream. I don’t whimper. I just dry–heave against the floor until something pink threads out of my throat and the taste of silver makes my gums throb. Theo finally lets go, fingers slow, like he’s peeling a prize off the meat.

“Be good,” he hums against the shell of my ear, voice low like prayer, like fucking. “You’re not alone anymore, Jess.”

My breath stalls. My stomach folds in on itself. I twist, gagging, bracing on one elbow, and my eyes drag toward the far corner-

He’s here.

Riot.

Slumped. Chained. His face is swollen on one side, slack on the other. One arm’s bent wrong, the other limp in his lap. His eyes-

God, his eyes are open. He’s watching me.

Riot coughs, low, wet, like something inside him’s dying slower than it should. I crawl to the farthest corner, away from the stench of his ruined breath, the sound of my own heartbeat fucking me raw.

“W–What..happened to him?” Trembling, I ask, not showing him any fear.

Theo squats low, gloved fingers curling under my jaw, lifting my face until I can’t pretend I’m not staring at Riot’s ruined chest rising in thin, rattling swells, every breath a confession of failure.

“He wouldn’t kneel,” Theo murmurs, thumb pressing hard into the hinge of my jaw until it pops. “He thought he could keep you clean. Like you were ever anything but a feral little slit begging to be filled.”

around a sob I won’t let

hand to drag itself along his thigh. trying to move,

Theo whispers, and his breath is sour with wolfsbane and something fouler, something that smells like the back of a throat swallowing screams. “He kept you alive.

of my lips, smearing the taste of his skin of the caves

9:34 Thu, Sep 4

Chapter 135

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and called it devotion. I don’t look away. I don’t close my mouth when he pushes them in, pressing over my tongue until I gag and the floor swims and Riot’s eyes flare wide, as if

satisfied, Theo shoved me into the floor and locked the cell

like

and yet, looking at him right now makes me

though every cell screamed no, because his chains were still rattling, because his pulse was still crawling under the meat of his throat,

I tried to say, my tongue thick with

It poured. Pityless, soaked in rot, slick with all the things we’d become to each other in the dark: heat–bonded, death–bound, two beasts suckling on the same desecrated myth. I should have turned away. I should have backed off, swallowed it, scrubbed it out with

His chain scraped the wall with a hungry little

torn through something collapsing in his

buckled, hand flat on the piss–stained concrete, breath seizing

I tried, but my body betrayed me, a pulse low in my belly giving me away, heat like a bruise swelling up behind my navel. “I just wanted to

dragging myself on forearms, on elbows, my cheek splitting open

“Riot, please,”

left me full of things I couldn’t

and when my fingers touched his ankle, bare, filthy, hot with fever, I felt something howl behind my teeth–not a

terrified,” he

meat

in the

Chapter 135

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I did—I did, or I thought I did, or I needed to pretend I did, because

fingers harder into the wreck of