Page 97 of Savage Hearts

Now I knew that wasn’t possible. And as much as Killian tried to deny it, he also felt this… whatever the fuck this could be called for Mila.

Maverick had already gotten with the program.

“You’re delaying the inevitable,” I said.

In the tinted side window of the car, his reflection shook his head at me.

“There is no inevitable. You want to keep and share her with Maverick, that’s on you. Leave me out of it. One of us has to keep his head on straight when it comes to the club princess.”

“Yeah? And what exactly do you think she’ll do?”

He shrugged. “Give her a chance and she’ll mount your head on a pike. Luckily for you, I won’t let that happen.”

“You make her sound violent and conniving.”

“Isn’t she?”

I shook my head. If he had bothered to spend any time with her at all, he would know she was far from it.

As much as she wanted to put on a tough exterior, beneath it all hid a small, frightened, vulnerable girl that I’d realized I wanted to protect.

I might want to tease her and play with her… hell, I might want to mark her. Treat her a little more roughly than what was sane, but I wanted to protect this small girl all the same.

“You want to know what I think?” I asked, turning around to face him.

He didn’t answer me, but instead crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re scared,” I said.

He scoffed.

I nodded. “No, you’re really scared. Because this one feels different. She feels different from Lilliana.”

My brothers and I had always shared women. Nothing turned me on more than dominating a woman with my brothers, knowing we were bringing her pleasures andwantedpain together.

But it hadn’t always been that way.

Lilliana was Killian’s first love.

She hadonlybeen Killian’s. I didn’t know the woman as well as my brother did, since I had been young when they’d gotten together.

But she was the violent one. The conniving one. The one who would have Killian’s head, plus Maverick’s and mine, on a fucking pike if that served her purpose.

And the bitch only had two purposes in life.

Money and power.

Too bad for her, she betrayed us, and now, instead of having any of those things, she was in hiding somewhere in the world, afraid to step foot in Chicago, inourterritory, for fear of her life.

A very real fear, at that.

Perhaps it was because she was his first in everything that the betrayal had left so deep of a mark. It didn’t matter, and it wasn’t fair when he’d started to paint every woman he met with the same brush.

Mila was painted a deeper shade than the others because she was the one we were supposed to kill and didn’t.

He was supposed to be the one to pull the trigger but didn’t.

He knew she was different for us.

---