The Predator (Dark Verse #1)

by RuNyx

Tristan 'The Predator' Caine. They called him the predator. His reputation preceded him. He rarely went on the hunt but when he did, it was over. When he did, he went straight for the jugular. No distractions. No playing around. For all his unruffled attitude, the man was more lethal than the knife cutting into her thigh. He was also the reason she had come to the party. She was going to kill Tristan Caine.

Her breath seized in her throat at the voice coming from behind her. The voice she hadn't been able to forget for a week. The voice that had whispered the ways of murder into her skin like a lover's caress. The voice of hard whiskey and sin.

"I didn't know your father pimped you out to his friends, Ms. Vitalio,"

A predator in the skin of a man. And she knew one thing undeniably, deep in her bones. They were not done.

If voices could be drinks, his was a centuries-old vintage whiskey, rolling off the tongue, down the throat, leaving a trail of fire inside, making every cell in the body aware that it had been consumed.

"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." And then, for the first time, he cut the call.

She'd hit this stone wall and bruised herself so many times she'd lost count. She detested this world. She detested the way every man thought himself a self-entitled jackass. She hated how every woman either had to bend to their will or suffer for life. She despised this world.

She would remember it because, in that moment, something inside her shifted. Shifted utterly, because in that moment, the enemy, the man who hated her more than anything, had done what no one had ever done. In that moment, the man who'd claimed her death had given her a glimpse of life by doing something he probably didn't even realize he'd done. In that moment, the enemy had done what no one had ever even tried to do for her. He had made her feel a little less lonely.

She cried for the girl she had been, the girl who had died after the fall today. She cried for the lost hopes she'd been clinging to, for the lost dreams of maybes. She cried because she had no one to give her a shoulder and hold her as she cried because she had to wrap her arms around herself and hold herself together, in the basement of her enemy. She cried.

"Don't you know not to run away from predators, sweetheart? We like the hunt."

“Don’t. Ever. Try. To. Fucking. Control. Me.”

Amara was wrong - he wasn’t nothing. He felt. He felt so deeply he didn’t let himself feel. He felt so deeply he feared his own reactions to it.

That was his weakness. He wanted her and he’d made it obvious. He wanted her and that was the reason she was still alive. He wanted her and that was why he’d protected her, sheltered her, saved her, time after time, from her own father. This want was his weakness.

He devoured her in the rain, with his gun beneath her jaw.

Moments passed. Long, loaded moments. Short, sinful moments. With the ease of sand slipping through the fingers. With the difficulty of a broken clock. Moments passed. With heartbeats. With breaths. And the air changed again. He was there.