“No,” I agreed. “You’d rather dress her up like a street whore and fuck her like one too. Don’t try to pretend this is about anything more than that.”
“And yet you don’t hear me complaining when you make her kneel on the fucking floor for an hour and a half every morning. Or how you’ve got her following your fucking routine to the letter to make sure you get all of your fucking meals the minute you want them,” he bit back.
“What difference does it make if she follows Saint’s routine in the mornings?” Blake demanded, weighing in with me.
Kyan’s face darkened at the signs of us uniting against him. “None,” he snapped. “But that’s not what I want from her. It’s what Saint wants. How is she our girl if she’s only following his orders and not ours?”
“You never had a problem with me being in charge before,” I growled.
“I never had a problem with you setting me on your enemies and asking me to beat the fuck out of them because I wanted to do it. When have I ever bowed to a command I didn’t agree with?” Kyan demanded.
And fuck him, but it was the truth and we all knew it. Maybe that meant I wasn’t in charge at all. But the mere suggestion of that had my heart pounding and my palms growing slick.
“So what do you want from her?” I snarled.
Our fight had stolen the restless energy which had been dancing beneath my skin, but it couldn’t banish the feeling of powerlessness which came with having my ritual sabotaged. My mind was a whirling storm of emotion and so much of it was dark that I was sure it would corrupt me to my core.
“Everything she gave me last night,” he replied, his eyes flashing with a warning.
What the fuck did that mean? What did she give him last night? What had been so fucking special about their little night out that he’d thought it was worth doing this to me and Blake?
“Did you fuck her?” Blake demanded suddenly and I ground my teeth as I waited to hear the answer to that.
“What if I did?” he growled. “We never said we wouldn’t fuck her.”
“She said it,” I snarled. “That was her one and only term. Do we break our fucking word now, Kyan? Who the fuck are we if we do that?”
Kyan snorted derisively, his gaze scraping over me slowly. “I didn’t fuck her,” he said and I exhaled slowly, wondering if I was relieved about that because I was jealous of him having her or of her taking his attention from me. “But I never agreed not to. I agreed not to force her to. Which wasn’t exactly difficult because I’ve never had any desire to force a girl into sex in my life. But we never agreed not to if she wants it.”
I pushed my tongue into my cheek as I read between the lines of what he was saying. He clearly thought she wanted it. I just didn’t know what to do with that information.
“Then why don’t we just decide it now?” Blake asked. “We just agree not to fuck her.”
“No,” Kyan growled immediately and my fucking dick didn’t want to make that deal either. Though it seemed like a pretty tall order to believe she’d ever want in my bed after the shit I’d just pulled. And if she wasn’t riding my cock, I definitely didn’t want her riding his.
“What if I command it?” I asked in a deadly tone.
“You can command a broomstick to climb right up your ass, but I doubt the thing will leap on up there for you,” Kyan replied, fixing me in his gaze. “Besides, are you saying you want your word to mean shit? Because I’ve seen the way you look at her, it’s pretty obvious you want her too.”
My heart leapt at the accusation and not just because it was true, but because he was calling me out on my own bullshit and I didn’t like that one fucking bit.
“We need rules,” Blake insisted. “Rules about what we can do with her and when.”
“I’m not agreeing to you caging me,” Kyan spat.
“Not rules for what we can’t do,” Blake growled. “Just a way to make this even. So that this shit doesn’t happen again. She’s not a fucking chew toy for us to fight over like mutts.”
No she wasn’t. Tatum Rivers was something much more important than that, but none of us were going to even attempt to put a name on exactly what that was.
“What rules then?” Kyan snapped.
There was too much animal in him for this kind of discussion. He was a beast governed by instinct; he did what he wanted when he wanted and didn’t like following rules. But I was the fucking king of rules so if that was what we needed, then I could certainly manage that much.
“Like where she sleeps,” I said darkly. Because out of all the fucking photos he’d sent me of the two of them last night, that had bothered me the most. Not the fact that he’d put her in danger on his motorbike or even the fact that he’d allowed her to brawl like an alley cat in that godforsaken illegal fighting pit he loved so much, not the way he’d dressed her like a fucking porno biker chick or how he’d coated her in his scent by wrapping her in his jacket and then putting her to bed in his shirt with a fucking hicky. No. All of those things had incited me, but the fact that he’d put her in his bed at the end of it was what had blinded me.
“She’s not going back in that bathroom,” Kyan said instantly. “I’m all for fucking with her, but that shit is just spiteful. If something belongs to me, I look after it. Which means she needs a bed.”
“Well there’s only three bedrooms here, asshole, and I’m not bunking in with you to give her one,” Blake snorted.
“There’s an easier solution than that,” I interrupted. “She rotates.”
“You mean she takes turns sleeping in with each of us?” Blake asked and I was surprised to see he didn’t look as repulsed by that as I’d expected.
“Yes.”
“In that case, on the days she’s in with me, she doesn’t have to go and kneel outside the fucking crypt at six am,” Kyan said instantly and my lip curled back at that. “If she’s warming my bed for me, I want her there when I wake up.”
“That makes sense,” Blake added infuriatingly and I ground my jaw.
“She still has to be up to make breakfast,” I said, refusing to budge on that.
“Obviously,” Blake added and some of the tension left my shoulders.
“If I wanna take her for a night out, I can do it without having to answer to anyone,” Kyan added coolly.
I didn’t like that one fucking bit, but what was I supposed to say?
“We’re on lockdown here because of that bastard virus,” I said. “Going out last night was really fucking stupid for more reasons than the chance of her escaping.”
“The police shut the place down anyway,” Kyan said with a shrug. “So I won’t be going back there any time soon and I can agree to stay on campus until lockdown is over.”
“Fine. We can take her out individually,” I conceded.
“But we have to let each other know,” Blake added.
“Are we good then?” I asked. “No more shit anyone needs to air?”
I looked between my two best friends, the space dividing us feeling like a chasm filled with things we still hadn’t said.