The Predator (Dark Verse #1)

by RuNyx

"You should know not to come into the house of the enemy, all alone, unprotected. And you should know never to sneak up on a predator. Once we catch the scent of your blood, it's a matter of the hunt."

"Death isn't the main course, sweetheart. It's the dessert."

"You don't hate me," Morana pointed out. "No," he shook his head, his eyes hardening by the second, resolve entering them as she saw him inhale heavily. "I despise you."

One day, she vowed, she would kill Tristan Caine.

"The way you scaled the walls," she began, in a conversational tone that was so fake she could roll her eyes at it, "you just confirmed what I always knew you were." He just raised a lone eyebrow. "A reptile," she provided, smiling forcefully at him.

"No one else gets to kill you, Ms. Vitalio," he spoke quietly. "The last face you see before you die will be mine. When it comes to death, you're mine."

Leash? She wasn't a fucking dog. She sure as hell wasn't a fucking daughter.

She shouldn't have returned. She should have taken her fixed, amazing car and hightailed it to someplace other than this mansion. But she hadn't. Because Morana Vitalio was many things but she wasn't a coward. And if she was going to die, she was going to die knowing that.

"Touch me again, and I will break yours."

Morana looked at the message for a long time, before closing her eyes and going to sleep, no worry in her heart. If Tristan Caine killed her in her sleep, it'd probably be a mercy.

"You wish me well, do you?" he murmured softly, his lips almost touching her skin yet not, making her body ache for that touch. "Don't you know not to run away from predators, sweetheart? We like the hunt."

Tristan Caine terrified her, but it wasn't because of the death he was bringing her slowly, the death he would bring her one day, the death he raised in her. No. It was the life.

He was taking her out on his bike? His bike? The sacred, holy bike? The bike he actually enjoyed riding?

She knew he would destroy her, but not today. Today, for the first time, she got to be no one but a girl on the back of a man’s motorcycle, if even for a moment. Today, for the first time, she was just a woman with no past and no future, just this endless road with this man, this freedom, and this life.

She yelled even louder—unashamed, unbound, unchained. She let herself feel deeper—uncaring, unhinged, unabashed. It was just a bike. It was just a ride. It was just a man. It just was.

Dead or alive. Nice. Very mob-like.

Something changed in the moment she chose to kept silent instead of speaking, forfeiting her life, and he chose to shoot her in the arm instead of her heart, sparing her life. Something between them changed, just like it had on that night in the dark, this time in the middle of a crowd of lethal men.

“I don’t know whether to snap your neck or fuck the life out of you,”

Set an example. Tell Daddy Dearest to fuck off.

Saving her had destroyed him. One day, he vowed as he watched a man pick up the little girl and take her away, his eyes on her, he would collect his debt.

“Thank you, for saving me,” she spoke to his hard, motionless form. In a way, it was better that she couldn’t see him. It made this much easier of sorts. “Not only in the past few weeks but twenty years ago.”