Vengeance in His Bed novel Chapter 30

Chapter 30: Self-Loathing

The car tore through the high-district transit lanes like an uncoiled serpent. Dorrent’s rigid profile. His hands were clamped onto the leather steering wheel at the ten-and-two positions, his knuckles white and bloodless, his veins bulging against his wrists under the sheer pressure of his grip.

Beside him, the passenger seat was a chaotic theater of frantic, desperate motion.

Jannah was thrashing against the electronic security locks, her small, pale fingers clawing uselessly at the reinforced glass of the passenger window before whipping around to rip at the seamless leather dashboard. "Let me out! Dorrent, let me go!" she screamed, her voice cracking, raw with a volatile mixture of panic and unadulterated fury.

In her violent struggle, her body twisted and turned within the confines of the seat. The oversized, crisp white dress shirt she had borrowed from Shadron betrayed her completely. With every desperate kick of her legs against the floorboards and every frantic lunge toward the central console, the hem of the shirt rode higher and higher up her hips.

It exposed the smooth, uninterrupted length of her long, slender, pale thighs, gleaming like polished marble in the dashboard’s dim blue light. As she twisted her torso to slam her fist against the locked door, the fabric bunched entirely over her hip bones, sliding past the safe boundaries of modesty to nearly expose the junction of her body.

Dorrent didn’t look over. He kept his eyes locked straight ahead on the empty, shimmering asphalt of the midnight highway, but his peripheral vision absorbed every single detail with agonizing precision. He could see the pale swell of her hips, the frantic, rapid pulse throbbing in her inner thigh, and the heat radiating from her skin. The sweet, sharp scent of her terrified, volatile omega pheromones filled the enclosed cabin, clogging his filter vents, sticking to the back of his throat, and making his stomach churn with a sickening, toxic heat.

A sudden, sharp memory cut through his rage, violently dragging his mind backward through the archives of his mind, forcing him to remember the very first day he had laid eyes on her.

It had been in the 3rd Street. He had been sitting in the plush, darkened interior of his father’s car, looking through the one-way tinted glass while Guron stood on the cracked cobblestones, trying to buy the services of a common herbalist. Dorrent remembered the exact moment Jannah had turned the corner of that rotting lane. She had been covered in the grime of the slums; her faded, patched dress was practically falling apart at the seams, her hair was an untamed, messy curtain, and her boots were caked in the foul mud of the lower-market stalls. She had been dressed completely anyhowly, a chaotic mess of poverty and exhaustion.

And yet, looking through that glass a few days ago, Dorrent’s heart had done a strange, heavy skip that he had immediately tried to bury under a layer of unadulterated cruelty.

Even then, covered in dirt and surrounded by rot, her face had been striking. Her features possessed an ethereal, haunting perfection—the sharp, stubborn line of her jaw, the wide, piercing depth of her dark eyes, and the narrow, delicate curve of her waist. She was beautiful. In fact, as he looked at her thrashing in his passenger seat now, the realization hit him like a physical blow: she was exactly, precisely his type. She was the exact physical blueprint of the women he had been naturally drawn to five years ago, before his world had turned to ash.

A dark, bitter wave of self-loathing flooded his chest.

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