Page 288 of Craving Venom

Zane doesn’t stop.

He jerks his chin at the floor. “Pick it up.”

The waiter sweats through his collar. He starts to kneel, reaching with shaky hands, but Zane’s grip tightens again.

“Use your mouth.”

The man hesitates.

So Zane twists his wrist again.

The waiter drops to his knees. His tongue drags against the sharp edge of glass. It cuts into his lips, rips his mouth open, making the blood drip down his chin and onto the marble. His breathing hitches with every jagged scrape.

The man howls as the glass slices deeper into his tongue. He starts to rise, maybe to crawl away, maybe to run, but Zane doesn’t let him get that far. He lifts his boot and presses it against the side of the man’s cheek and pins him down. The waiter lets out a garbled noise, more blood seeping past his lips, mixing with the shards still scattered beneath him.

I don’t even realize I’ve moved until I’m climbing higher on his lap, thighs tightening around his, silk dragging up until I can feel the sharp edge of his belt buckle against my inner thigh. I lift my eyes to meet his, and everything stops.

It’s not rage I see there.

It’sdevastation.

The kind that bleeds. That burns. That doesn’t belong in this room. His jaw is tight, but underneath all that fury, there is something that aches for me. It coils in his stare like a promise and a confession he hasn’t said out loud.

He loves me.

He hasn’t said it. I’m not sure he ever will. But it’s all over his face now. In the way his body shields mine. In the way he’s crushing someone just for calling me a word I didn’t even answer to.

And I know, right then, if he wasn’t in prison, if he didn’t carry a hundred crimes on his back, if we had even one version of reality where he was free, I’d love him back. God, I would love him back so fucking hard it’d ruin us both. I press my palm gently to his chest and plead without saying a word.

Don’t.

Don’t blow your cover.

Don’t ruin what we came here to do.

Don’t make me fall in love with you.

Not when I could be the reason you die today.

Not when I’m the one who might’ve pulled the trigger without ever touching a gun.

When I went upstairs to get my purse, I slipped a tracker into the lining. I turned it on right before I walked out the door.

Tria will alert the right people anonymously. She’s probably already working on tracing my location, making sure my signal lands where it needs to. If I’ve timed it right, the cops will be here in about twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes before uniforms flood this mansion. Twenty minutes before panic replaces power. Twenty minutes before every rich, twisted fuck in this room scrambles to hide the chains and the blood and the girls.

Twenty minutes before Zane gets caught.

I didn’t want to betray him.

But I couldn’t trust him either.

Not after the lies.

He said he never killed an innocent person.

His mother? Maybe she deserved what she got. Maybe every crime tattooed across Zane’s record came with a fucked-up reason he could justify. But not Alex.

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