Chase Dubois POV
"If it makes you feel any better," he wheezed, a grin spreading through his pain, "I didn't fuck her with my cock."
"Just with... everything else," I spat out.
"Well… yes. Not with my cock, though. I wouldn't cross that line, brother."
Greyson Dubois. The gift that keeps giving!
He had my face.
I see it every morning when I look in the mirror, and every morning I hate it a little more. The same jaw. The same eyes. The same mouth that our mother kissed goodnight when we were small enough to share a bed.
But the differences was in the bones. In the way he holds himself—loose-limbed, careless, like the world owes him something and he intends to collect.
I hold myself a little different, like I'm bracing for a fall all the time. He holds himself like gravity is just a fucking suggestion.
Who could blame him? I have been breaking his falls since we were babies! Protecting his troubled ass, covering up his fucking sins... keeping him away from our father's squeezing hands!
He is what I would be if the incident had taken something else. If it had taken my hunger instead of my legs. If it had taken my shame instead of my future.
When we were ten, he kissed four of Tilly Ann's ladies' maids. I had to listen as she went on and on about me, the whore of Troita, she had labeled me and I did nothing to correct it.
Because I thought that was my job—protecting my red nosed little brother.
And he repaid me by fucking my bride in a stupid storeroom with her mother three steps away!
I swung the bat again, hit him right in the arm.
"Chase! I swear to fucking God, if you don't stop hitting me—"
He was a lunatic. A ravaging lunatic.
Rage erupted in my skull. I raised the log to swing again.
He moved like a snake. He grabbed the wood and wrenched it from my grip, tossing it clattering into the corner.
"Stop hitting me, Chase. I said I haven't fucked her yet!"
Yet. He said yet.
The word was a match to gasoline. I launched myself from the chair.
My legs screamed, buckling, but my momentum carried me into him.
We crashed to the floor in a tangle of fists and fury. I got in two good hits before he shoved me off with his stupid, strong legs.
I sprawled on the floor, gasping.
Grey stood over me, wiping blood from his lip. "What is your problem, brother?" he yelled. "This is the plan, isn't it?"
"The plan?" I stared up at him, my own face twisted in anger. "Finger fucking my fiancée in a fucking storeroom was not the plan, Greyson!"
"Right?" He smiled, the smirk never leaving his face. "I forgot I was supposed to wait till the wedding night," he said.
But I saw it anyway.
He wasn't playing a part with her. He was feeling it. I could see it in his eyes when he said her name. He wanted her for himself.
"Just following the plan, Chase."
"The plan," I snarled, pushing myself up onto my useless elbows, "was for you to be a shadow. Lend me your fucking cock when I ask for it. Not to... taste her. Not to make her scream my name with me down the hall, listening to every word of it."
His grin was back, wicked and knowing.
"At least it was your name she was screaming." Then he got carried away like he was reliving it. "Fuck! She liked screaming. She liked my mouth on her. She's going to like my cock even more."
The fire in my chest exploded. "Stay away from her!"
"Or what, brother? You'll wheel after me? What do you care? Yours…" he gestured to my pants, "is not working."
"Grey!"
He laughed. Son of a bitch laughed "My apologies. I got carried away."
His cruelty amazed me. He was just as devilish now as he was at ten years old, going around performing atrocities in my name!
"Fine, I will wait till the wedding night. But I must say, Father's plan to make you look less pathetic and more powerful by sticking a dragon princess by your side might just preserve your claim to the throne, brother. And stop the coup that's brewing amongst ranks about a cripple being future Alpha." He rubbed his face.
"The question is… what on earth did he promise King Adonis Winchester to get him to tie his only girl to an invalid?"
Invalid.
I hated that word. Invalid. But it was what I was. What I will always be.
He turned to leave, brushing dirt from his clothes.
I spoke to his back. "Touch her again, and I will use more than wolfsbane. I will burn this whole 'plan' to the ground, and you with it."
He paused at the door.
"Then find someone to switch with on your wedding night, Chase. I am out and I'm taking my cock with me," he said softly, and left.
I was alone again with the steam from the cooling bath and the blue, mocking sky.
Every sound from her room had been painful. Her moans. His grunts. The way she'd said my name—Chase—when it was Grey's mouth on her. I'd sat in the dark and listened to my own voice pleasure my bride, and I had never hated my brother more.
Fuck.