Page 29 of Empire of Dark

And hell, did I ever want to fuck her in that moment. Angry. Vile. Slam her against the wall and pummel my cock into her.

Her and her damn leggings. There was a reason so many dresses were in her closet. Easy access. Anywhere. Anytime.

That was what I did, and that was what every woman that had been here in her place had loved. Anywhere. Anytime.

Ada disappeared out the doorway of the study and I jerked into motion, my hand going down to readjust my cock straining hard against my black pants. Straining with nowhere to go.

Heaving a sigh, I tore my stare off the open doorway of my study and moved around to sit at my desk. My fingers ran over the left edge of it, pausing along the mar in the wood that I’d made with a dagger when I was only five.

Napoleon’s desk. Squirrelled away by my grandfather to this castle two hundred years ago.

My brother, Rodolfo, and I had been playing, or rather, Rodolfo had been trying to teach me how to flick out a blade from my boot and spin it in my hand properly, and instead of practicing what I should have, I’d been the one playing, throwing my knife into the air and catching it. Except I didn’t catch it when I had thrown it all the way up to the ceiling and it landed—blade side down—into the edge of the desk.

I’d grabbed the hilt, desperate to get it out before our brother Stanley saw, but then yanked out a big chunk of the wood in the process.

That had been my first lesson in not forcing something.

If I had just lifted the blade out as straight as it had gone in, I would have been fine. But I didn’t. I panicked. And yanked. And forced. And ruined the desk.

What we had even been doing here in Grandfather’s office was beyond me. But Grandfather had been gone and Stanley was his favorite, so he was in charge.

Not that it mattered when Grandfather returned. Rodolfo covered for me and took the beating that was the punishment for ruining the desk. He was well into adulthood, while I was just a kid. If someone was going to be whipped, Rodolfo was alwaysgoing to make sure it wasn’t me. And he’d smirked at me the whole time the cat o’ nine tails were lashing into his back.

He wasn’t going to die from it, and pain meant little to him, much to our grandfather’s disgust.

The nail of my forefinger dug into the crevice, scratching at it.

Work. I needed to work to get the image of pounding my cock into Ada with her back slamming against the bookcase out of my mind.

I peeled off my jacket, rolling up the dark sleeves of my button-up shirt.

I shifted my attention to the stacks on my desk, shifting papers, reports, and proposals about but not really looking at them.

Ada unnerved me.

Women didn’t do that, be it human or panthenite or malefic. I controlled them. I doled out pleasure or I didn’t. I used them as a means to an end or a distraction.

They didn’t unnerve me. Didn’t make me pause.

But Ada had just done that. Made me pause.

Made me waste two hours piddling away time as my thoughts had been consumed by her. At the fire I saw within her when she’d stormed into my study.

I’d thought her defiant, but mostly docile. Docile and innocent, and thus far, annoyingly resistant to my charms.

Yet the woman that had just stormed into my office wasn’t docile. She was a champion, with right on her side, charging into battle.

Never mind that she hadn’t checked her facts before mounting her attack on me.

She had seen my daughter done wrong, and she had been hell-bent on crucifying me for it.

Damn panthenites. Always. So.Good.

To her credit, she’d realized pretty quickly that black and white was really grey.

That was where our species differed.

Most panthenites worked in black and white.