Page 90

“Especially the damaged version of you,” he exhales against my hair. “That’s the only version I want.”

We stay like that for a moment, pressed together in the cold alley, and for reasons I don’t stop to examine, I whisper, “I need to find out who sent them.”

He opens his eyes. “I will,” he says darkly. “I’ll find them.” His voice drops. “And I’ll bring their heart in a box if you want proof.”

I smile again, and my cheeks ache with it. I can’t remember the last time I smiled this much in a single night.

“Did you just quote Snow White?” I ask.

He looks confused. “Snowed who?”

I roll my eyes and shove his chest lightly. “I can’t believe you don’t know the story.”

He takes a step back, but his eyes drop to my neck, and the darkness returns.

“We’re getting someone to look at your neck,” he says.

“It’s fine,” I reply, though even to my own ears my voice sounds scratchy.

“It fucking isn’t.”

He looks at my dress, then shrugs out of his jacket with a low grumble and settles it around my shoulders.

I don’t protest, I am freezing now that the adrenaline is wearing off.

The thought that he might catch a cold crosses my mind, and the concern is so strange that I don’t know what to do with it.

He takes my hand, and I let him, too lost in my own head to resist.

We step out into the street, the night bitterly cold. He asks the bouncer about a shop nearby.

Two minutes down the road, we are told.

We start walking, my heels clicking against the pavement.

“You must be cold,” I say, and something possessive glints in his eyes.

Without warning, he scoops me up, holding me bridal style.

“Problem solved,” he smirks.

“Put me down,” I protest, kicking lightly.

“No.”

“I can walk.”

“Your feet hurt.”

I glare at him, but my arms slip around his neck anyway, because my feet do, in fact, hurt, and he keeps walking as though I weigh nothing at all.

It might be the adrenaline, or the exhaustion, or the unsettling fact that I feel safe in his arms.

I shouldn’t let this happen.

He’s a Markev.

Everything about him goes against what I believe.