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My palms eased over his shoulders. A groan rumbled from his chest. I circled his body under the guise of stripping him and savoring his taste. I dotted a line of tender kisses across his pecs, his shoulder, and eventually his back.
His shirt dropped like a released sail, catching on his elbows.
A gasp ripped from the back of my throat. The inked angel spanned his broad shoulders and traveled all the way down to his tapered waist. My fingertips trailed the detailed edges of the wings raised at full mast, and my heart rejoiced in recognition.
The tattoo was the same. Only this time, I wasn’t ten years old, and I wasn’t seeing it through the slats of a closet door.
I never saw my second kidnapper’s face. I never heard the gunshot. But when my mother’s sobs ended and the monster I’d one day come to marry stopped giving orders, a second man cursed about his shirt being covered in blood, and I’d peeked long enough to see a shirtless man with a tattoo on his back standing next to the one holding the pistol.
A tattoo of an angel with his wings spread proud and wide.
It was familiar but different.
Years would pass before I’d learn that the teenager I’d once met in the Flynn garden had an identical twin. The image of the angel and the monster whose flesh it illustrated would forever occupy a part of my mind.
A very dark part.
Raphael looked over his shoulder without moving away from my touch. “Do you like it?”
People say that time heals all wounds, but anyone who’s suffered wounds like mine knows that’s a lie.
Vengeance is toxic. But justice? That’s healing.
“It’s ... perfect.” A true smile blossomed.
He spun around, lifting my dress and then me in one combined effort.
I’d been so deep in my memories that the abruptness of his movement caught me off guard. Panic lurched in my chest, and I felt the flush drain from my face.
Raphael’s wolfish grin faded at my reaction. My heart seized, but before either of us could respond, his cell phone vibrated.
“Fuck. What time is it?” He dropped me to my feet and whipped the device from his pocket. “I need to take this.” He kissed my forehead and patted my butt. “Sosanna will make you something that’ll help with the hangover.” He turned away and muttered, “Fucking Zoto and his piss-poor timing.”
Raphael answered the call, barking out short phrases as though talking in code or to someone with limited knowledge of the English language.
I felt his gaze burn into my back as I paced to the door.
Raphael wasn’t a fool. He’d soon realize his theory was flawed.
I wasn’t a money-hungry vixen with an appetite for power and danger.
I was his mortal enemy. I had been for ten years.
Ever since the night Tiernan Brennan had blackmailed Raphael Flynn, thus ripping everyone and everything I’d ever known and loved away from me.
My in-laws liked to believe that it was they and not St. Patrick who drove all the slithering reptiles out of Ireland. They joked that they’d sent them all to Boston.
A nest of vipers. That’s what they called the Flynn family.
Most found it fitting. God willing, I’d make it symbolic.
How would I seek justice? I’d cut off the head of the snake, of course.
Lucifer
Fucking Russians.
I tossed the blood-drenched gauze in the rubbish bin I’d dragged into our makeshift infirmary, the room otherwise known as the casual dining room.
