Cruel Covet

### Chapter 1: Ruin Me First

The first time Kazimir Thorne put his hands on me, I had a seven-inch blade strapped to my inner thigh and his father’s blood on my conscience.

He didn’t know either of those things yet.

What he knew was that I was underneath him, my back arched off the Egyptian cotton sheets, my uniform blouse torn open and hanging off one shoulder, and that my body was betraying every oath I’d sworn over my father’s open grave.

“You’re shaking,” Kazimir whispered against my throat. His voice was ruin. Low, velvet-wrapped shrapnel that scraped against my eardrum and settled directly between my legs. “Is it fear, Vespera? Or is it that your cunt is so wet it’s dripping down my fingers and you’re embarrassed?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t breathe.

His hand was between my thighs—two fingers buried knuckle-deep inside me, his palm grinding against my clitoris with a slow, devastating rhythm that had my vision blurring at the edges. His other hand was pinned against my throat. Not squeezing. Just *there*. A reminder. A leash. The weight of his palm against my pulse point was enough to make my entire nervous system short-circuit.

“Cat got your tongue?” He curled his fingers upward, finding that ridged spot inside me that made my hips buck off the mattress. “You had so much to say an hour ago. Called me a pathological narcissist with a God complex. Said I was compensating for something.” His thumb pressed hard against my clit, and I choked on a sound that was half-scream, half-sob. “Does this feel like I’m compensating for anything to you?”

“Fuck you,” I gasped, but it came out broken. Fragmented. My hands fisted the sheets so hard my knuckles were bone-white.

Kazimir laughed. A dark, beautiful, terrifying sound. He pulled his fingers out of me slowly—agonizingly slowly—and I watched through half-lidded eyes as he brought them to his mouth. His grey eyes never left mine as he slid his fingers between his lips, tasting me. Sucking me clean. His throat worked as he swallowed, and the sight was so obscenely intimate that a fresh wave of arousal flooded my core.

“You taste like lies,” he murmured, pulling his fingers from his mouth with a wet *pop*. “Sweet, desperate fucking lies.”

He reached between us. I heard the metallic hiss of his belt, the shuffle of fabric, and then his cock was pressing against my entrance. Thick. Hot. The blunt head notched against my opening, spreading the slick heat of my arousal over him. He didn’t push inside. He just *stayed* there. Teasing. Torturing.

“Tell me you want it,” he said. His forehead dropped to mine. Our breath mingled. He smelled like sandalwood and whiskey and something darkly metallic—like the barrel of a gun. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you want me to fuck you, and I will. Say no, and I’ll stop. I don’t take what isn’t offered.”

It was a trap. The cruelest kind. Because he knew—*God*, he knew—that my body was screaming for it. That every nerve ending was coiled so tight I could shatter from a single thrust. He wanted me to admit it. To surrender. To give the monster a piece of my soul.

I should have said no. I should have grabbed the blade strapped to my thigh and opened his carotid artery. That’s what my father would have wanted. That’s what the Nox syndicate trained me to do since I was eleven years old.

Instead, I wrapped my legs around his waist, dug my heels into the hard muscles of his ass, and pulled him forward.

“I hate you,” I whispered, staring into those winter-grey eyes. “I hate every cell in your repulsive, entitled body.”

Kazimir’s jaw tightened. A muscle flickered beneath the sharp line of his cheekbone. Something dangerous flashed in his expression—not anger, but hunger. The kind of hunger that precedes destruction.

“I didn’t ask what you hate,” he said, and in one brutal, fluid motion, he slammed his hips forward and buried himself completely inside me.

The sound that tore out of my throat wasn’t human.

He was big. Bigger than my body had prepared for. The stretch was immediate and overwhelming—a full, aching invasion that split me open and sent a white-hot bolt of pleasure-pain racing up my spine. My walls clamped down around him involuntarily, and Kazimir let out a guttural groan that vibrated through his chest and into mine.

“*Fuck,*” he hissed through clenched teeth. His grip on my throat tightened—just a fraction, just enough to make the edges of my vision spark. “You’re so goddamn tight. Christ. You’re strangling my cock.”

He didn’t give me time to adjust. He didn’t offer a gentle rhythm to let my body stretch around him.

Kazimir fucked like he fought—ruthless, relentless, and with the absolute intention of leaving scars.

He pulled almost entirely out, the blunt head of his cock catching on my rim, before slamming back into me so hard the heavy oak headboard cracked against the wall. The sound echoed through the cavernous Apex Suite like a gunshot. My hands flew from the sheets to his shoulders, my nails biting into the hard plane of his muscle through his wrinkled dress shirt. I felt the fabric tear. I felt his skin break beneath my fingernails.

He hissed, his eyes flashing with a dangerous, feral light, but he didn’t stop. If anything, the sting of my nails only spurred him on.

“That’s it,” he growled, his hips snapping forward in a brutal, punishing cadence. The wet, slapping sound of our bodies colliding filled the room, obscene and loud in the quiet night. “Bleed me, Vespera. Scratch me. It won’t change the fact that you’re underneath me, taking every inch of my cock like you were fucking made for it. Made for me.”

He hooked both of my ankles over his broad shoulders, folding me nearly in half. The new angle was devastating. It drove him impossibly deeper, the thick ridge of his cock dragging against the hypersensitive roof of my vaginal wall with every merciless thrust.

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone my dead father’s face. The only thing that existed in the entire world was the punishing stretch of Kazimir’s body claiming mine, the wet, sloppy sound of my arousal coating his shaft, and the overwhelming, suffocating heat of the Apex Suite.

My mind was screaming *murder*, but my cunt was weeping for him. It was a grotesque betrayal, a war between my trained instincts and my raw, animalistic biology. And biology was winning.

“Look at you,” Kazimir panted, his rhythm turning savage, frantic. A drop of sweat fell from his jaw, landing on my exposed collarbone. His blonde hair was plastered to his forehead, those icy grey eyes burning down at me with an intensity that should have set the sheets on fire. “The big, bad Nox princess. Coming undone on a Thorne’s cock. Your tight little pussy is gripping me so hard I can barely move.”

He was lying. He was moving fast enough to bruise my cervix, the headboard now violently denting the plaster wall with every impact. My breasts bounced with the force of his thrusts, and he dropped one hand from my ankle to brutally palm one, his thumb raking over my hardened, aching nipple.

The pressure inside me was building to an unsustainable level. A tight, coiling spring in my lower stomach that was winding tighter and tighter with every slap of his skin against mine.

I was going to come. I was going to shatter around the son of the man who murdered my family, and I was going to scream his name while I did it.

*No.*

My right hand, the one not currently drawing blood from his shoulder, slipped down my trembling torso. Past my ribs. Past my torn blouse. Down to the hem of my bunched-up skirt.

The cold steel of the blade’s handle kissed my sweaty palm.

The familiar weight of the seven-inch dagger brought a split second of clarity through the haze of mind-bending pleasure. I wrapped my fingers around the grip. I could do it. I could whip it out, bury it in the side of his neck while he was distracted by his own climax. I’d kill him, ruin the Thorne bloodline, and die knowing I avenged the Nox syndicate.

My thumb flicked the safety strap on the sheath.

Kazimir’s hand moved faster than a striking cobra.

He released my breast and caught my wrist mid-air, slamming it down into the mattress above my head with bone-crushing force. His hips never stopped their brutal, pistoning rhythm. He just pinned my weapon hand down and leaned his weight onto it, his grey eyes locking onto mine with terrifying, omniscient clarity.

“Don’t,” he whispered. The playfulness was gone. His voice was pure, lethal ice. “Don’t you fucking dare, Vespera.”

He knew. He’d known the whole time.

Tears of sheer, agonizing frustration pricked my eyes. The denial of the kill, combined with the relentless, heavy friction of his cock hammering into my G-spot, snapped the coil inside me.

“I hate you,” I sobbed, my back bowing off the mattress as the orgasm ripped through me without warning.

It wasn’t a gentle wave. It was a violent detonation. My vaginal walls clamped down around him like a vice, pulsing and milking his length in hard, rhythmic spasms. A loud, shameless moan tore from my throat, echoing off the high ceilings of the suite. My vision went completely white, my body seizing as wave after wave of blistering, electric pleasure flooded my nervous system.

“Fuck—yes,” Kazimir roared.

He drove himself into me one final, brutal time, burying himself to the hilt. I felt his cock jerk violently against my spasming walls, and then a searing, thick heat flooded my core. He groaned long and low, his entire body rigid above me as he pumped his cum deep inside me, marking my insides with his release.

For ten agonizing seconds, the only sound in the room was our ragged breathing and the thundering of my own heartbeat in my ears.

Then, the cold reality rushed back in. The sweat cooled on my skin. The ache settled into my bruised hips. And the weight of what I had just done—and failed to do—crushed my chest like a boulder.

Kazimir pulled out of me with a wet, slick sound. I flinched at the sudden emptiness, feeling the immediate, warm trickle of his release sliding down my inner thigh, mixing with my own arousal. It was filthy. Degrading.

He stood at the edge of the bed, his chest heaving, his ruined dress shirt hanging open to reveal a sculpted canvas of pale skin and hard muscle, marred only by the bleeding crescent moons my nails had carved into his shoulders. He looked down at me with a terrifyingly blank expression. The golden boy mask was firmly back in place, hiding the monster I’d just let fuck me raw.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a silk handkerchief, and methodically wiped my slick off his softening cock before tucking himself back into his tailored trousers.

“Who sent you?” he asked, his voice completely devoid of emotion.

I lay there, skirt bunched around my waist, blouse torn, his cum leaking out of me, the hilt of my useless dagger still pressed against my thigh. I stared at the vaulted ceiling, my throat raw, my soul feeling like it had been put through a meat grinder.

He didn’t know the answer yet. But he knew enough to be terrified of it.

And the worst part? As I looked at him standing there, perfectly composed while I lay ruined on the bed, I knew with sickening certainty that if he touched me again right now, I’d let him do it.

*Three weeks earlier.*

The iron gates of Oakhaven Academy loomed against a grey, weeping sky, looking less like a school and more like a mausoleum for the ultra-rich. I stood at the edge of the cobblestone drive, my borrowed leather satchel heavy on my shoulder, the seven-inch dagger a comforting pressure against my thigh.

I was no longer Vespera Nox, grieving daughter and sole survivor of a syndicate massacre.

I was a clean-slate scholarship student. A ghost. A bullet with a name carved into its tip.

And I had just walked directly into the predator’s den.

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