“They do,” Dante grumbled, still looking for clothes.

The chain around his neck and what hung from it were conspicuous when he was naked and moving like that.  I didn’t imagine she could miss seeing them any more than I, and that didn’t make me sad.

“What do you want?” I asked her, trying to make my tone neutral but landing on borderline rude.

I hated that she was still shamelessly watching him.

I was starting to understand the phrase claw her eyes out.

“I just had to see this with my own eyes, though I still can’t quite believe it,” she said, directing the words at Dante’s naked back, using a tone with something in it, some bit of ownership for him that I simply could not tolerate.

My hands were in fists, and I knew it wasn’t a good sign.  My temper was quickly running away from me.  “Are you kidding me?”  Disdain dripped off the words.  “Did you think we needed your permission?”

For that, she looked at me.

I took a step closer to her.  “He was mine before you ever had him, and even when you did, know this, a part of him was still mine.  You never got what I had.  You had what was left when I was done with him.  Even last night, and it was a long night, what I got from him had no piece of you in it.”

For that, I got the reaction I craved.  In her dilating pupils, her shortened breath, her quivering lip, I saw how I’d annihilated her with a few brutal sentences.

Good.  I had no mercy for her.  She’d helped to ruin everything I cared about, helped to make me less whole.

But still, she didn’t speak to me, didn’t address my words.

“Did you think I wouldn’t know?” she asked him, a world of accusation in her voice that I for one thought she had no right to.  “We’re sleeping under the same roof.  Did you think you could keep this from me?”

It took him so long to answer that I thought I might scream, but then, “I think it’s none of your fucking business,” he told her in a tone so black and deadly and overflowing with scorn that it made me shiver.

“You think that?”  she glanced at me, her scathing eyes at my throat.

Even then, I didn’t catch the significance.

“What else don’t you think is my business?” she asked, something pointed in her tone that I didn’t catch right away.

It was the sort of thing that would float around for a while before it parked itself in my consciousness.

“I think none of it’s your fucking business and it never was,” Dante thundered back, his gorgeous temper coming out to play.  “How’s that?  Clear enough for you?”

“You’re going to regret this,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to him or me.

Either way, I took exception.  I opened my mouth to lay into her again when she added.

“You go to bed with trash, Dante, and you can expect things to get dirty.”

My mind went a little hazy for a time.

Only seconds, I believe, but certainly enough time to do some damage.

When I was cognizant again, a naked Dante was behind me, arms wrapped around my chest, holding me back.

Tiffany was in the hallway clutching her bleeding nose with both hands, a boxer clad Bastian apparently appearing from nowhere and holding her back, as though she might attack me.

I thought it was cute that anyone thought I needed protection against her.  The prissy, entitled bitch couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.

“Get out of here,” Bastian told her sternly.  “Quit fucking instigating, and go.”  He aimed her down the hallway and nudged her until she started to haltingly move.

“You’re going to regret this,” she sobbed as she stumbled away.

“Come back here,” I snarled at her, trying to heave myself out of Dante’s impossible hold.  “Let me do a few more things I can regret, you fucking home-wrecking whore!”

There was an awkward, pregnant moment when she was gone, punctuated only by the sound of my rage-filled, panting breaths, when it was the three of us left in the hallway, none of us dressed.

I noticed that Bastian looked pretty freaking edible when he was half naked right about the time that we all realized my sheet had slipped down to my waist in the struggle, leaving me topless.

Dante started cursing as he yanked it back up.  “Avert your fucking eyes,” Dante barked at Bastian.

Bastian, who’d clearly only shown up to help, raised his hands in the air and started walking away with a muttered, “You’re welcome for the help, brother.”

“Wow,” I said when we were shut back into my room.  “You know that’s the first time I’ve put my hands on that little princess bitch.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  She never does her own dirty work, always keeps her hands clean.  She’s an instigator, not a fighter.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said succinctly, not looking at me.

“You really hate her, maybe even more than you hate me.”

“I never hated you.  I was just extremely upset with you for a very, very long time.

Whatever he wanted to call it, it had felt a lot like hate, but I didn’t get into that with him.  Instead, “What’d she do that you hate her that much?  Did she sleep with Nate too?”  It was supposed to be a joke, one in very poor taste, but a joke.

He flinched.

My brows raised and I tried to fake a smile.  “Oh ho.  She did?  Is that what happened?”