Chapter 68: Possessive Reckoning
The air in the hallway changed the moment Mara opened the door. It thickened, charged with a new, violent electricity. Veronica Barlowe filled the frame, her towering height and that wild corona of hair making the space seem suddenly, dangerously small. Her sharp green eyes didn’t bother with Mara. They scanned the apartment behind her, hunting.
“Where is she?”
Mara leaned against the doorjamb, a slight, knowing smile on her lips. “Good morning to you, too. She’s resting.”
Veronica’s nostrils flared. She took a half-step forward, and Mara had no choice but to give ground or be trampled. Veronica moved past her, into the warmth of the living room. She stopped dead.
Her head turned slowly toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. She was a predator catching a scent. It was in the air, unmistakable: the salty-sweet musk of sex, of Stephanie’s release, and beneath it, the stale tang of spilled wine and tequila from the night before.
A low, almost inaudible sound rumbled in Veronica’s chest.
She didn’t walk down the hall; she stalked. Mara followed, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor, observing.
The bedroom door was ajar. Veronica pushed it open.
Stephanie was sitting on the edge of the bed, the cream-colored sheet wrapped around her torso like a toga. Her long hair was a tangled curtain, her face flushed, her light blue eyes wide and glassy with post-orgasmic haze and lingering shame. The room smelled intensely of her. The ornate mirror on the wall reflected her dishevelment, her vulnerability, back at the three of them.
Veronica’s eyes burned. They took in the trembling hands, the bruised-looking mouth, the way the sheet clung to damp skin. They saw everything.
“You,” Veronica said, the single word dripping with a venom so cold it burned. “You let someone else taste what’s mine?”
Stephanie flinched. She looked from Veronica’s furious face to Mara’s calm one in the doorway, and a dizzying wave of nausea and headache crested behind her eyes. The pounding from the tequila, deferred by adrenaline and pleasure, returned with a vengeance. She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples.
“Veronica, please,” she mumbled, her French accent slurred with fatigue and pain. “My head…”
“I asked you a question,” Veronica snapped, taking another step into the room. The proximity was overwhelming.
Stephanie tried to stand, to find some dignity, some ground to stand on. The sheet tangled around her legs. The movement sent a spike of agony through her skull and a wave of dizziness through her core. She swayed, the room tilting, and stumbled forward.
She fell into Veronica.
Her face pressed against the soft wool of Veronica’s coat. Her hands gripped Veronica’s arms for balance. For a second, there was only the familiar, spicy scent of her perfume, a scent that had once meant safety, desire, hope.
Veronica’s hands came up, not to embrace her, but to steady her. And in that closeness, Veronica inhaled. She smelled the alcohol seeping from Stephanie’s pores, sour and old, layered over the new, intimate scent of her arousal.
She saw red.
Her gaze ripped away from Stephanie’s pained face and locked onto Mara, who was watching with an expression of detached interest.
“You.” Veronica’s voice dropped into something quiet and deadly. She gently, but firmly, pushed Stephanie back to sit on the bed. “You saw her. Drunk. Wrecked. From what I did to her. And you thought what? That she was in any state to consent to your mouth on her?”
“She didn’t seem to be complaining a few minutes ago,” Mara said mildly, crossing her arms.
“She was intoxicated,” Veronica snarled, the legal precision in the term making it sound like an indictment. “Her judgment was impaired. You took advantage. You saw a vulnerable, hurt girl and you helped yourself.”
“I offered her a bed. She was alone. You made sure of that.” Mara’s smile was icy. “I simply provided a different kind of comfort.”
The controlled fury in Veronica snapped. It wasn’t a rage of passion, but of principle, of a profound, possessive violation. Stephanie watched, helpless, as Veronica turned her full body toward Mara. The move was swift, a lawyer closing on a hostile witness.
“You don’t get to touch what’s mine.”
Then she swung.
It wasn’t a wild punch. It was efficient, brutal, straight from the shoulder. Her fist connected with Mara’s jaw with a sickening, solid crack.
Mara’s head snapped to the side. She stumbled back into the hallway wall, one hand flying to her face. She didn’t cry out. She just lowered her hand, looked at the smear of blood on her fingers, and then back at Veronica, her eyes now alive with a dark, unexpected amusement.
Stephanie gasped, her headache forgotten in the shock of the violence.
Veronica stood over Mara, her chest heaving, fist still clenched. She pointed a trembling finger at her. “You stay away from her. You look at her again, I won’t use my hands. I’ll use my law license. I will unmake you.”
She turned back to the bedroom, to Stephanie, who was shivering on the bed. The fury was still there, a live wire in the air, but it was now fused with something else, something frantic and protective.
“Get up,” Veronica commanded, her voice rough. “Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”