Page 50 of The Vigilant

“Hey, that’s mine?—”

“Not fucking anymore.” His eyes zipped over the screen. “What the fuck is this? What the fuck are you doing?”

I blanched. I was saving my best friend.Or had been until he ruined everything.

“None of your fucking business,” I charged, snatching the robe off the floor even though I made no move to put it on. “Who the fuck do you think you are just barging into my room?—”

“The one trying to protect you. Now what. The. Fuck. Is. This.” He punctuated each part of the question like the words were bullets fired from the chamber of his throat.

He lifted my phone up, the screen showing my profile on the app.

The chat was gone. Messages gone.My only lead on Mara—vanished.

I jutted my chin forward, fighting the sting of tears in my eyes. “How I like to spend all my free time,” I answered, my voice dripping with disdain. I launched my arm out to try to snatch it back, but he pulled away too quickly.

“Bullshit.” He stepped closer to me.

“Give me my phone back.” I was seething, anger and lust rioting a storm in my chest.

“Not until I get the truth.” His lip twitched like a hungry beast. “I know you lied to me about what Kang told you. I want the whole fucking truth, and I want it now.”

My eyelids fluttered, and I let my tongue take a swipe over my bottom lip. “Or what?”

“Or I give you that ass whooping I promised,” he rasped, his voice curled with his snarl, but his eyes told a different story. Like two buoys trying to stay afloat when they wanted nothingmore than to sink over my bare skin and drown in my naked depths.

“You don’t have the guts.” I shouldn’t provoke him, but I couldn’t help it. Not when the energy in the room had changed so drastically.

Yes, there was anger and frustration laid like a minefield of firecrackers around us, but it was the tension—the sexual undercurrent laid between us like a foundation of C4. Sooner or later, one of those sparks was going to send this whole moment up in smoke.

I couldn’t help but notice the stark difference in Tynan’s threat to manhandle me compared to the masochistic mistreatment User923X promised. Those messages made my blood run cold, but Tynan’s rough, hot words spread like magma through my limbs, bringing me a kind of painful ache that didn’t even require a physical touch.

I’d never felt anything like it before. Childhood crushes and a few stolen high school kisses had been nothing. Training wheels on the evolution of passion. And then came Randy, and with him, that distinct erotic longing became tangled and tainted by trauma.

“Try me,” he muttered, his mouth hovering hardly an inch from mine.

It would take nothing to lift up on my toes and press my lips to his. They looked so firm right now. So punishing. I wondered if that was how they’d feel on my mouth…on my body.

My phone screen dimmed just then, and I recalled everything those lips had just made me lose.

“You ruined everything,” I murmured, finding his curious eyes and creased brow for only a second before I let my fist fly.

With one hand, I punched Tynan in the side, his stomach hard but unsuspecting, and then grabbed my phone with my other.

He grunted in pain, and the nanosecond of distraction was something I could work with.

I lunged to the side to dart around him as though running from my overprotective guardian had ever proved to be the answer.

Chapter Eleven

Sutton

Imade it two steps before the thick root of his arm snaked around my middle and hauled me back against him. The ridges of his chest. The warmth of his angry breath. All fierce, fuming male like a living stone statue rising up around me.

Air clawed at the inside of my throat, trying to escape the riot in my chest. For the first time in a long time, I felt fear. Not that he would hurt me—not in the traditional sense—but fear that he would change me irrevocably all the same.

My breath finally made it up the column of my throat and soared through my lips like a phoenix bursting from the ashes with a resurrected cry of war.

I struggled, legs and arms flailing at him, my elbows trying to land pointed blows, but I was too close to him to exact much damage at all.

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