step toward him. “Mal, please just let me go.” The name just slipped out, she had no idea why, and when she saw the way his eyes flared she wished she could slip it back in just as easily.
“Lord Ryn,” she said hurriedly trying to mitigate the damage. “You have healers who want to be here. You don’t need me. Hell, you dropped me here and forgot I existed.” She went on quickly when it sounded, even to her ears like a complaint. “I have no military experience, or even medical training. I bring nothing to the table here.”
“You say that when my skin still dances with the kiss of your power. You healed my best hunter in seconds. Something that would have taken the OIP’s finest healer hours, if he could do it at all, and you did it without leaving a single scar.” He looked her over, a banked heat thawing his cold eyes for just a flash. “And I didn’t forget you existed.”
She ignored his words and the tone behind them to continue. “Does it matter to you at all that I don’t want to be here?”
“What you want changes nothing,” he said slowly and with finality. “I have claimed you, and if your father or anyone else tries to take you from me they will die.”
“And that he is my father and I love him doesn’t matter to you either does it?” She hated that her eyes were shiny with frustrated tears, but the fact that he was so unfeeling and autocratic made all of it twice as hard to take.
“Right now my orders will be to bring him in alive,” he told her with the same cold voice. “If any of mine die, that will change.”
He raised a hand as if he would touch her face and Serenity flinched, stepping back and away from him while she fought to hold back her emotions. They would do her no good with this man. “Let me send him a message.”
“And tell him what?” Mal asked his hands now fisted at his sides and his eyes glacial cold.
“That I am a pampered and unharmed head healer not a soldier.” She said looking away from him as a frustrated tear escaped her tight hold and flowed down her cheek. She wiped at it angrily. “He might let it be if he thinks I’m safe.”
“And he’ll believe you want to be here?”
She snorted in doubt. “No,” she dismissed. “No one who knows me would believe I want to be here.”
His jaw flared as he ground his teeth. She wondered, as she felt the pelting of rage, if there would ever come a time when he would lose control of all that anger and strike out. She knew by the reaction of his men and his reputation that he did. But that wasn’t the same as seeing it. Maybe it would be enough to curb the memory of that stupid kiss. Something that she should not be thinking of when he stood there and threatened the life of her father.
“But he might believe I am safe enough where I am and let this go,” she kept going. “He knows I have to heal, and never liked the chances I took on Earth.”
“You are safer here.”
His grumble told her that his anger had simmered down, but she had a feeling what she was about to say would change that. She made sure he was looking into her eyes when she told him the blunt and honest truth. One he would not miss.
“If you kill my father I will never heal for you again, no matter what that costs me. Even to my death. I will find a way to escape or I will die trying, and all your grand plans will be for nothing.”
His hand shot out and the tray of medical supplies beside and behind her went flying, tray and all. It crashed into the wall of expensive medical equipment with enough force the heavy machines fell like dominoes, and the sharp scissors and scalpel that had been on the tray jammed so hard into the wall they stuck there, like macabre wall art.
Serenity raised her chin, breathing hard but defiant in the face of his rage. “Do you always throw a child’s tantrum when you don’t get your way?”
His hand went to her chin and gripped it hard, pulling her up to her toes as he growled down at her. “Do not threaten to leave me again,” he bit out