“Get it,” I told her. “Anything you want.”
“I’m not sure I’d be any good,” she’d whispered. “It would be such a waste…”
“Ingrid.” I turned her toward me, stepped into her space, towering over her until she had no choice but to look up at me. “Trying something new is never a waste. And you’ll be good—no, you’ll be fucking amazing.”
“You really think so…”
“I wouldn’t be here telling you to take what you want if I didn’t already know you would be…Let me give you this, doll.”
After the afternoon we’d had at the gym, I felt a sense of relief as a genuine smile broke out on her face.
Half an hour later, we were at the park. Armed with a sketchbook and a tin of dark graphite pencils, Ingrid had quizzed me over form and structure and how to translate what she saw onto the page. She struggled to begin with—she was just too uneasy with herself—but then I pulled her between my legs, my arms bracketed around her body, her back against my chest. Her scent, all sweet, warm, distracted me while I guided her hands across the paper, helping her learn to imprint first the shape of a distant bandstand surrounded by trees, then the finer details.
“If you hold the pencil like this,” I murmured, low, into her ear, “then all it takes is the lightest movement of your wrist to capture these leaves. See?”
She choked out an unsteady, “I-I think so.”
I smirked. I didn’t think her attention was on the page at all. Hers, I suspected, was like mine: on the closeness of our bodies, the growing heat between us—the ease with which I could rotate her onto my lap, parting her legs to draw her low onto my hips, passersby be damned.
Somehow, I restrained myself. My arm wrapped around her as she attempted a sketch on her own, hand trailing down the length of her skirt as she leaned into me, her body warm against mine.
When the sun had set and turned the scenes Ingrid was trying to work through into muddy shadows, she said she’d better get home. She didn’t say why, but I knew already. Her father. That fucking asshole who’d put the string of dark bruises against her throat.
Which is how I found myself back at the gym again. Nightfall upon the city, Ingrid locked up in that place with a monster she wouldn’t let me confront, wouldn’t even let me know about, I had needed to gosomewhere to work off my rage. So I found myself alone at the punching bag, fists slamming into the leather, every strike aimed at Samuel’s skull in my mind.
Because if I let myself be anywhere near that house tonight, I’d tear the man apart. Rip him open. Leave him unrecognizable.
Ingrid had asked for a peaceful night.
And the only way to give her that… was to stay the hell away.
At some point, the heavy door at the end of the hall groaned open. Footsteps—expensive leather soles on concrete. Too many of them.
I didn’t stop. I kept hitting the bag, my breath coming in hot bursts.
Then I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and my blood ran cold. All thought of Samuel was displaced by the man who now stood before me, mouth lifted sideways in a cruel smirk.
Darragh O’Malley.
He stood there, flanked by two shadows that looked more like brick walls than men. He always looked too clean for the fucked-up and dirty business he ran.
My gaze dropped instinctively to Darragh’s waist. He wasn’t wearing his jacket; it was draped over one shoulder, giving me a clear view of the belt cinched around his trousers. The dark leather was embossed with a serpent-like dragon, its scales etched with cruel precision. The silver clasp was thick, heavy, and polished to a mirror shine.
My skin fucking crawled. I could still feel the phantom sting of that buckle—the way the dragon’s head would catch the light just before the metal tore into my back, the cold silver meeting hot blood.
“Still got anger problems I see,” he cajoled, his Irish accent softened somewhat by the American twang gradually making its way in. “Tell me, lad… Who’re you pretending the bag is tonight? Your daddy?” He smirked, “Or me?”
I didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking him in the eye. I turned back to the bag, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“Leave me the hell alone,” I grumbled.
Darragh’s smirk lingered. But his eyes were hard.
“Speaking of the old man,” he went on, strutting around the punching bag to place himself back into my eye line, “how is he?” Then the smirk dropped into a hateful sneer, that fucking sick twisted look glinting in his eye. “How’s your mam?”
I froze. The mention of my mother was a knife across my throat.
Darragh tutted, shaking his head. “Terrible thing, that train accident… wonder who’s to blame.” He looked at me with an insincere quizzical expression, eyebrows raised. “Youdon’t happen to know, do you, Tristian?”
