“Why did you lie to me, Ingrid?” I demanded, my voice low and dangerous. “Why the hell were you at The Obsidian tonight?”
Her shoulders tensed, and she looked away, her fingers knotting together. “I... I just had to go. I had things to do.”
“Things to do?” I stepped toward her. “You went to a nightclub, you went to Darragh’s territory… without a word to me. You put yourself in a situation that could have ended in a body bag. Give me a better answer than ‘things to do.’”
Her chin lifted, a flash of uncharacteristic defiance in her eyes. “What about you, Tristian? You never said you were going there. Why wereyouthere tonight?”
I narrowed my eyes, my jaw tightening. “I actually have business with Darragh. Business that doesn’t involve you being cornered in dark alleyways by pieces of shit like Brandon.”
“What kind of business?” she pressed, her voice trembling but firm. “You said you were going to lay low.”
“The kind you don’t need to worry about,” I snapped back, matching her deflection.
The air between us was charged.
I wanted to break something. Wanted to shake the truth out of her. There were things eating her alive that I could fix, if she would stop fighting me. But I’d done that already and all it had gotten us was more broken trust.
I had been thinking of a different way for us to decompress. A way to build trust through a different kind of intensity. But we weren’t built for healthy therapy and “talking it out.” We were something darker than that.
“Doll... you don’t trust me,” I said.
“...I do,” she whispered.
I forced myself to breathe as she closed the distance between us, taking my battered hand in her smaller ones. She looked up at me with those doe eyes, swimming with sadness and pain.
“Then why did you lie to me earlier?” I asked gently, giving her one last opportunity to come clean. “Why did you go to the club?”
Her shoulders tensed again. I watched her fidget with my fingers—the tell-tale sign she was losing the battle with her own thoughts.
“It... was nothing. I-I promise. I don’t want to bother you with it,” she replied.
I nodded slowly, pulling my hand back. The rejection made her brows furrow in a way that was almost painfully adorable. I reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head, tossing it aside. Her eyes trackedthe movement, her gaze lingering on the ink covering my skin before she forced herself back to my eyes.
Before she could process the shift, I reached out. My hand wrapped around her jaw, and I pulled her flush against me. She let out a soft, hitching gasp before I stole her breath, kissing her with a hunger that tasted like desperation. She was stiff at first, confused by the sudden heat, but I threaded my hand into her hair and held her there until I felt her melt. I walked us toward the bedroom, never breaking the contact.
We entered the bedroom, and I pulled away before I gestured toward the mattress. “Sit.”
She obeyed without a single question, the little nympho eager to see where this was going. I approached her slowly, my fingers going to the buckle of my belt.
“Take the dress off.”
Her hands were shaky as she hesitated, then pulled the fabric over her head. She bit her lip, a nervous habit I silenced by brushing my thumb over the skin until she let go. She looked breathtaking in that ditsy floral bra, a splash of innocence in my dark room. I wanted to tear it off her.
“You have two options.”
She watched me cautiously, her thighs pressing together, fear and desire warring in her eyes.
I held up one finger.
“Option number one. You tell me the truth. We’ll talk about what happened tonight: why you lied to me, why you went to The Obsidian, and what Darragh said to you in his office.”
I held up a second finger.
“Option number two. You lie to me again, tell me nothing happened... I throw you on the bed, fuck you to sleep, you wake up, and then tell me the truth. Lie to me after that? Option two may just repeat itself.”
I let the threat hang in the air.
Ingrid swallowed hard, her eyes darting to mine as she made the choice that sealed her fate. “Nothing... nothing happened—”
