I bellowed and struck with every fury inside me. Men dropped away, nursing their injuries, their commitment to pain not nearly as loyal as mine. If I lost, it would mean sacrificing everything. If they lost, they just voided a paycheque.

They couldn’t win.

It was impossible.

Kicking them away, I had a clear path to murder Jealousy.

She flinched and darted toward Eleanor and Drake, inserting herself into the sexual friction of their war. She rubbed at her eyes as if something burned. My gaze locked on Eleanor, hating the torture on her face, the need in her body, the fidelity in her stare as she saw me. “Sully...I can’t—”

“You can.” Words were thick and foreign in my mouth. “Fight it.”

Her face scrunched up as another gun fired. I ducked as a bullet grazed my shoulder blade, stinging like a wasp. Spinning around, I struck the bastard with both hands, the rope doing nothing to prevent my ferocity.

“Fuck off, Sullivan,” Drake sneered, his hands grabbing Eleanor’s breasts, a scene of fornication as he gyrated his hips into her ass. “She wants me...not you.”

I lost it again.

Red miasma.

Black infection.

I let loose on the mercenary who stupidly tried to stop me. I beat him until his face was unrecognisable, all while my attention fixated on Jealousy as she tipped her head back and shot a vial of elixir down her throat.

My eyes narrowed, second-guessing my flickering sight.

Why?

Why would she—

With a heart-breaking sigh, she uncapped the third and final bottle of elixir. Bringing it to her lips, she braced herself, then upended it. Tossing the empty vial away, she rubbed provocatively against Drake’s side.

“Want to join, huh?” Drake shuddered as her right hand went behind Eleanor and grabbed his cock. “Fuck...” His gaze snapped closed as his body jerked.

“Jess...what are you—Oh, God.” Eleanor curled into herself, stopped by Drake’s hands on her breasts, sweat gleaming all over her as she continued to fight the insidious need for sex.

Jealousy swooped up on her tiptoes and planted her lips on my deplorable brother.

He groaned, his hands still clinging to Eleanor. His hips rocking, feeding his cock into Jealousy’s fist, rubbing himself against both women. He went to pull away, but Jealousy wriggled closer, she pumped his erection, entrapping him within her spell. Eleanor was sandwiched as Drake returned her kiss, his hands kneading my woman’s breasts, the three of them writhing in a threesome of fucked-up eroticism.

Jealousy kissed him harder, her cheeks hollowing as she fed the third vial of elixir onto his tongue.

I waited for him to spit it out.

To strike her down.

But...he swallowed.

He returned Jealousy’s lust, opening his mouth, their tongues lashing with sin and spit. Jealousy moaned as her elixir reached a fever, throwing herself into it while Eleanor still battled hers.

A mercenary punched me in the jaw.

I howled and returned the favour, refusing to look away from the sinful scene before me. My heart thundered as Jealousy held up her left hand.

She still held my phone.

Still poised her thumb over the ‘load’ button.

Oh, fuck—

I stumbled in my haste.

Don’t!

Riding Drake’s leg, giving herself entirely to the unfightable lechery, Jealousy moaned again and tapped her thumb against the screen.

I was too late.

Her spine bowed.

Drake’s body jerked.

Eleanor cried out with carnal hunger.

All three of them fell.

A tumble of nakedness and need, blinded and overloaded by the Euphoria loading system.

Eleanor!

A mercenary pressed a gun to my head. “Quit fucking moving!”

Eleanor remained sandwiched between Jess and Drake.

No one moved.

And I didn’t care anymore.

If Eleanor was loaded in that fantasy, I had seconds to remove her. A few precious seconds before my brother fucked her. No one on earth would stop me. No man. No animal.

No one!

I spun and struck his wrist.

He howled.

The gun smashed and skittered across the tile.

Diving for it, I turned off all my pain, snatched the weapon, found the trigger, and fired.

One, two, three, four.

Four men.

Four bullets.

For once, my aim was true.

Two lodged in their chests, one in the head, and one in the redhead’s hip. He screamed and scrambled away from me as I climbed to my feet and braced over him. With no fucking mercy, I pressed the trigger point-blank into his skull.

A spritz of brain and bone soaked my pristine tile. Men had become corpses, and I was finally alone.

Tripping forward, thanks to the weakness in my harpooned leg, I crossed the distance to the paused orgy and wrapped my fists around Eleanor’s ankles. Yanking her from the prone bodies of Jealousy and Drake, I pulled her until her bareness no longer touched theirs.

Jealousy twitched, her eyes flaring wide as the virtual reality kicked in and delivered her into the fantasy. Drake groaned as he blinked too. Both of them were no longer in this world, but the BDSM club that I’d coded a few years ago. A raunchy, vulgar setting where a labyrinth of playrooms, dungeons, and toys would ensure my brother’s every sick wish was fulfilled.

But he wouldn’t fucking fulfil them with Eleanor.

Eleanor curled around herself, her arms hugging tight, wetness glistening down her inner thigh.

Shit, hurry!

Snatching my cell phone, forgotten beside Jealousy, I brought up the cypher and scrolled through the individual lines of code. Each goddess had their own unique identifier, a sequence already created for ease of VR insertion and activated by the eye lenses.

My eyes darted over the text, searching for Eleanor’s code, ready to delete it from the fantasy and free her.

Only...

There was no code.

Only Jealousy’s existed.

I looked up, my heart skipping a beat.

What the—?

I thought she’d betrayed us. I thought she’d finally shown her true colours, just as so many people I’d trusted in my past. Instead, she’d sacrificed herself so I wouldn’t have to watch Eleanor be raped by my sibling and earn a bullet in my brain when I snapped. She willingly slept with my brother, all while I knew about her feelings toward Cal.

She took elixir...even knowing how it affects her heart.

Shit.

Not only had Eleanor given me a gift of absolute devotion but Jess had too. She’d put her very life and happiness on the line.

How could I ever repay her? I owed her an insurmountable debt.

“Sully...” Eleanor’s gorgeous grey eyes snapped open, smoky with lust. “I can’t...I need...God!”

Her moan snapped me from my shock.

I owed Jealousy the biggest fucking apology.

But in that...I was also too late.

The fantasy had fully loaded. They were no longer here but there, and that was where they had to stay until the end.

I’d broken the farm boy hallucination with Eleanor when we’d removed our sensors, but only because I was the creator. I could manipulate from inside the falsity, sneak in and out through a back door.

My guests and goddesses weren’t so lucky.

It wasn’t safe to pull the plug now. Just like my elixir, Euphoria was far too potent. After previous attempts of cutting a session short had ended in brain damage, I’d learned that the only way out of the illusion was to fall asleep by natural means or to physically have an escape hatch programmed into the illusion.