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Complete bliss shines on her flushed cheeks, and I can’t help but stare at the halo of light that seems to be forming around her. The last thing I am is religious but, for a moment, I’m sure that Eva Brannan was sent from above to save me. I’m also sure that her radiance isn’t only due to the light filtering in through the window. I certainly can’t blame the high I’m experiencing on the chirping birds.
“Will you?” I ask her softly, drowning in the dreamy look in her eyes. When she shifts in my arms, mine tighten around her, keeping her in place. I’m fully aware that I’ll have to shake the feeling that she’s trying to get away from me every time she moves, but it’s fucking hard.
“Will I what?” she whispers.
“Will you go all in?”
“Why do you ask? Are you going to give me a choice?”
“I won’t give you a choice to decide whether you’ll marry me or not. Because you will. But I can’t dictate how you feel about it, can I?” Then, deeper. “Still, I want to know how you feel about it.”
She stares at me like I just dropped in from another world. “You’re serious? Marriage?”
I cup her cheek, my touch gentle, but my grip hard. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”
I don’t expect her to protest directly because she knows better than to antagonize me. But I am braced for her to find ways to thwart this. Maybe to go along with it for a while to appease me, but then slowly try to ease her way out of it when enough time has passed.
And of course she’d do that, and not only because she now saw me in my true monstrous form. But because I’m doing what Romano did. Holding her life in the palm of my hand and lording it over her.
“Listen, there’s one thing I want you to know,” I tell her while reaching down and pulling her leggings back up. We can’t get cleaned up here, since Goldie’s room doesn’t have a private bathroom, so we’ll have to do it at Eva’s apartment later. “I’ll never put your sister in danger in any way. I would never hurt her to get back at you.” Just imagining the pain that would cause Eva is enough to tear me apart. “The only people that will pay with their fucking lives for coming anywhere near you will be the men who dare to so much as look at you.”
“That will make interacting with males under any circumstances pretty damn difficult,” she replies, her pretty eyebrows knitting, some of her composed self returning. “And unless you plan on taking my career away from me, too, I’ll need the freedom to interact with them.”
My throat works.
I hate it, but she’s right. I’m not willing to admit it, though. I can barely put up with the men I charge with her security being around her, including the Flaming Skulls, because I know that all of them will imagine having sex with her at some point, and that makes me fucking murderous. It’s gonna be pretty damn hard to keep my cool with all sorts of Santi Rossis strutting like roosters into her path.
Eva places her palms on my chest, looking me in the face with that halo around her head.
“Listen, Micah, what happened tonight...” She scrunches her eyes shut and inhales deeply, as if composing herself to deal with the memory. “It didn’t change my feelings for you. I’m in love with you, and I’m not afraid to say it out loud. In fact, what I want to do is scream it out from the top of a mountain. But you do kill people.” There’s doom in her voice as she says those words, emphasizing the enormity of what I really am. “The way you took those men out last night, how you turned that room into a hellscape, that will stay with me forever. So...” She licks her lips as if preparing to break up with me, and my chest tightens so much it’s about to fucking snap.
My arms turn into an iron girth around her. “You knew who I was before you saw it with your own eyes,” I growl through my teeth.
“Exactly.” Despite the leather jacket between us, I can feel her touch directly on my heart. When she speaks, her voice comes out comforting, reaching untouched corners inside of me. “I knew who you were and I fell in love with you anyway. And you know why?” The blue in her eyes pours itself into the night in mine, and I hang on her every word. “Because I saw way past the gluttonous demon guarding the gates to your soul, making sure no real nourishment could reach it but poisonous anger. I saw the wounded boy who’d never known the warmth of a mother, yet still needed it, without understanding what it was that he craved. I saw that child go down a twisted, dark path, not knowing what he was searching for, yet ravaging everything in his path to find it. In time, that boy grew into the mythical beast, feared, wrathful, yet his soul was still inside his hard shell, all dried up and withering. But still alive.”
She lowers her face to mine as her final words fade out, and she closes that superb mouth over mine.
I’m done for.
This woman has my soul in her hands, and my future at her feet. When she breaks the kiss and rests her forehead against mine, her hands splaying on my chest, I love her so much that it hurts to breathe.
“So, if you could choose,” I whisper, her lips feathering over mine, “you would choose to be with me, of your own volition?”
“Life without you would be bland and pointless,” she replies softly. “It would be like returning to hospital food after you’ve had a feast.” She pauses, and the devil rears its head.
“But?” I prompt her.
“But you can’t keep doing what you’re doing, Micah. I can’t live knowing that every night you’re not warming my bed, you could be falling victim to a mayhem like the one last night. I’d die a little every time. It would drive me insane with worry, leaving me an anxious, neurotic shell.”
“I can’t just give up being a Heathen King, Eva,” I mutter. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh, don’t I know it? Romano doomed you to a living hell, and that doesn’t just stop after his death. But then promise me that you’ll never take part in a bloody massacre again.” She looks down at her hands resting on my leather-clad chest, and I know she’s thinking about the split skin under my bandages. “Let us find peace with each other.”
“Peace? You still don’t understand the demonic feelings you awaken in me, woman?”
“And I still haven’t made clear how thoroughly I return your passion?”
Her retort takes me by surprise, shutting me up. She takes my face in her hands, and such love washes over me from her, that it leaves me breathless. A soothing warmth spreads over my insides and, for the first time, I remember.
