“If I ask you to be careful?”
“I’ll consider it.”
His eyes darken.“Briana.”
There it is again.My name is like a warning, a prayer, a wound.
I push off the wall before I can think better of it and step closer, and he goes deathly still.I stop with less than a foot between us.Too close, but still not close enough.
The air warms.His scent wraps around me, smoke and leather and rain-wet earth.My pulse changes, and his does too.I hear it somehow, or maybe I imagine it.Heavy, controlled, but not calm.
“I’m scared,” I whisper.
His face changes.Not pity, but something worse.Reverence.
“So am I,” he says.The honesty knocks the breath from me.
“You?”I am shocked that he would admit something like fear out loud.
His laugh is low and humorless.“Constantly.”
“Of what?”
His eyes hold mine, and the alley disappears by inches.
“Of touching you wrong.Wanting you too loudly.Letting the beast in me decide protection means possession.”His voice drops.“Of becoming another monster you have to survive.”
My chest aches.I should step back.
“You’re not them.”
“No.”
“But you are a monster.”
“Yes.”
The answer should scare me, but it doesn’t, maybe because he doesn’t dress it up, maybe because every monster who hurt me smiled like he was civilized.Knox stands in an alley with blood barely healed beneath his skin and tells me the truth.
I lift my hand, and he stops breathing.I stop, too, my fingers hovering between us.
“Can I?”I ask and hate that my voice shakes.
His eyes flash black.Then brown.Then something in between.
“Yes,” he says, rough enough to hurt.
I touch the back of his hand.That’s all.Just my fingers over warm skin.The contact is small, but the feeling is not.
Heat moves through me, slow and terrifying.Not the sharp panic of memory.Not the crawling disgust of stolen touch.This is different.This is mine.Chosen.Fragile as a match flame in a storm.
Knox doesn’t move.Not a breath.Not a twitch.He lets me have the touch without taking anything from it.
That almost undoes me.I pull back before tears can humiliate us both.
His hand remains exactly where I left it.“Thank you,” I say.
His throat works.“For what?”
