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He moves so quickly I barely catch myself when he spins me around and presses my back against the railing. The hum of the city below should frighten me, but Ace would never let me fall, and when you’ve been through the shit I have, you learn what should be feared on this earth. And heights? It ain’t it.
The intensity of his eyes makes me want to look away, to look anywhere but into the fire, but I couldn’t even if I wanted to. His body traps mine, holding me exactly where he wants me, and I won’t be able to move until he decides I can.
“Do you see disgust, sugar?” he drawls in a low growl that sets my belly alight. It’s funny, I assumed I would always be broken, that there’s no way I would ever feel arousal, or want to touch a man again, but it’s like my body remembers Ace. It remembers our first kiss and the way I used to wonder what our first time would be like. And it’s not afraid, it’s not repulsed by the idea of being touched. It craves Ace just like the rest of me does.
I shake my head slowly, keeping my eyes locked with his.
“Words, Mia. I always want your words.”
“No.”
“What do you see?”
I open my mouth to respond, but words fail me because the things I see in Ace, they’re nothing like anything I’ve ever seen in another man, or woman, for that matter. The way he looks at me is wild and unhinged, but also so fucking beautiful.
He rests one of his palms on my cheek and carefully cradles my face while the other remains locked on my hip, keeping me exactly where he wants me. “I don’t need to look in the mirror for me to tell you the answer to that question. It’s adoration, and obsession, and a whole lot of anger that I missed so many years with you by my side. It’s guilt that I let that happen to you, that I couldn’t find you no matter how fucking hard I tried. It’s frustration that I’ll never be able to take away all the pain those assholes inflicted on you. I’ll never be able to take those memories away. But most of all, sugar, all you should see when you look into my eyes is how fucking much I love you and how I’ve loved you since the moment I realized what that word meant.”
The air leaves my lungs in a sudden whoosh, and I can’t breathe. Love? That’s an emotion I never imagined I’d get to feel. I thought eventually, maybe with Damon Lombardi, the man I was supposed to marry before Clara and I were rescued, I might be able to convince myself he loved me, but I never thought in a million years someone would be able to look at the broken shell of a woman and feel so strongly.
His thumb brushes over my cheek, wiping away tears I didn’t realize I was crying. “You gotta stop trying to leave, sugar. I know this is a lot for you. I know you’ve been through hell and your perception of the world is fucked up, but if there’s one thing you need to know, it’s that I will hunt you to the edge of the fucking earth if you run from me. I spent eight years searching for you. I spent endless nights scouring every fucking noticeboard I could find. I used favors to try to figure out where the fuck you were, and now that I have you, I can’t let you go. I fucking can’t, Mia.”
The reverence in his voice, the way he holds me so tight, just shy of the point of pain, like he knows where that line is and he’s not willing to cross it, makes me believe everything that’s come out of his mouth.
“Okay.” I nod. “I’ll stop trying to leave.”
A small smile tips up the corners of his lips. “Thank you, sugar.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ACE
It didn’t take as long as I thought it would to track down Kyle’s men.
The man himself is a different story, but the assholes that work for him, the ones who thought no one would ever care enough about their low-level asses to go after them, were almost too fucking easy.
Part of me wanted the chase. I wanted to use all the skills I’ve amassed over the years and dig and dig and dig until I uncovered all there was to know about these assholes.
But it was too easy.
Five men who violated my woman. Five men who will soon find their way to the bottom of Lake Michigan for their sins.
Because it was so fucking easy to find them, I dug around in their lives a little. None of them are married, surprise, surprise, but a few of them are deadbeat dads. From what I can tell from social media, they only see their kids on holidays and the occasional birthday, so I’ll be doing them a favor by wiping their pathetic sperm donors off the planet.
Three of the five still live in Chicago, so they’ll be my first targets. I’m not ready to go far from Mia just yet, and I’m not sure how on board she’ll be about taking a weekend trip to murder people, even if they did hurt her.
I look up from my computer to where she’s on her laptop at the desk Elijah set up for her. She hadn’t used any kind of device since high school, so I took some time this morning to show her the basics, but every now and then she lets out a frustrated sigh when she can’t remember how to do something.
Emerson is going to help her enroll to get her GED, but aside from that, she hasn’t given any indication about what her next steps might be, and I don’t think she knows.
Right now, Mia is trying to survive. She’s trying to wade through the pool of her new normal, one so vastly different from all the ones she’s lived through the last eight years.
She must feel my eyes on her because she looks up and her gaze clashes with mine right before a blush creeps up her neck and onto her cheeks.
This morning was heavy. And I threw the L bomb onto the fire without giving it much thought, but it made her stop trying to leave, and if I’m honest, she’s been more at ease since. Those words have been sitting heavy on my cold, dead heart for years, and there’s something liberating about having finally set them free.
She tilts her head to the side, waiting patiently for me to say something.
“Do you want some lunch?” I know I’m beating a dead horse at this point, that her issues with food stem much further than just since she came home, but I’ll keep trying, because eventually she’ll say yes.
