to the control, and squeezed her neck tighter. Noa’s tiptoes scraped the stone of the floor. All her energy was being used on staying conscious, but she fought her darkening vision to thread her hand into Diel’s black hair. She edged him closer toward her until his forehead touched hers. “Try to seduce me all you want,” he growled. “I will never release you.”
“No,” she whispered back, then brought the key to the back of the metal collar, pushed it into the small hole and turned it clockwise. “But I … will … release … you.” Before Diel even knew what was happening, the collar split apart and fell from his neck. Noa clutched the discarded metal in her hand.
Diel’s eyes widened, and his hand immediately dropped from Noa’s neck. Noa was ready. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she scrambled to her unsteady feet and ran at the fire. Without even hesitating, she threw the collar, its key and the remote into the flames, as a deafening roar sailed from behind her. She turned, lip curling in rage at the massive red scar on Diel’s neck, angry skin that had been tormented by shocks of electricity for far too long.
Diel turned, eyes wide, and Noa breathed in deeply. She planted her feet into the stone, holding her ground, then watched as the monster and the man began their battle for the person they were always meant to be.
Chapter 12
It was a dam breaking, wild ocean waves thrashing under a tornado burgeoning in the jet-black sky above. Diel could feel the control snapping from him piece by piece. He could feel his blood boiling, pure molten magma scalding the thinning walls of his veins. His bones vibrated with newly injected energy, and his muscles expanded like a condor flexing its wide black wings as it caught the current of a gale-force wind.
And Diel had no control over any of it.
His heart beat too fast, his lungs contracting and expanding in an erratic rhythm as they tried to keep up with the speed. But it was futile. Without the collar he was a fucking newly dropped nuclear bomb—detonated, irreversible, his sadistic wants and needs unable to be tamed.
Diel’s skin grew so hot that sweat poured down his face and neck. He had never had the collar off his neck. Gabriel turned it down when he went on kills, but his older brother always stayed near, ready to increase the voltage when the monster got too strong, too fast, too dangerous, and needed to be reeled back in.
But Gabriel wasn’t here now.
Diel’s vision flickered as he stared at Noa standing stoically before the blazing fire like a fucking pink-haired demon. He looked past her and saw the collar slipping further into the mountain of ash in the hearth, the key already lost to the splintering wood. It was the only collar they had. And she had destroyed it. She had fucking destroyed Diel!
His breathing grew even faster, and he felt his monster charging at the cage he had forced it into. The minute Noa had taken the collar from his neck, his monster had roared in victory. It had already craved the woman; her long pink hair and leather-clad body were his greatest fantasy come to life. My reward, it chanted whenever she was near. My reward for all the years in Brethren hell.
Diel felt his hot body break out in shivers, as if the flu held him in its grip, like how he had felt after he had been branded by the Brethren’s hot irons, as Father Quinn watched his body fight the resulting infection with zero medication—delirious, yearning for reprieve.
Diel looked down at his hands, as if they should appear different. He had only a second to take a single breath before the monster melted into the black mist that made up its previous form and infected Diel, a plague-like virus racing through his cells and blood and bones, shredding his muscles as it fought for control.
“No,” Diel spat out, teeth gritted and jaw aching. He tried to push the monster back, but without the threat of the collar’s electric shock, it was as stubborn as the devil, a demon intent on complete possession, finally overriding the last bastions in Diel’s body that had resisted its pull for too long.
Even in the high intensity of that moment, Diel remembered his younger self, the confused boy who dreamed of the day that the chains were torn from his body