Not waiting for him to change his mind, I turn on my heel and stride toward the door.
“Don’t you want to know why she killed him?”
His voice rings out across the conference room just as my fingers close around the knob. I freeze. My mind screams at me to move my ass. That I’m almost home-free and to get the fuck up out of this room with its emotional and physical carnage. But apparently, my body votes against my self-interest, because I remain at that door, waiting. Hanging on the silence weighted down with expectation.
No, with anticipation.
I remain silent, but no words are needed. My presence and refusal to escape the room speak loudly enough.
“Turn around, Ember. Turn around and look at me if you want to indulge in my trauma porn.”
I don’t manage to fully control my flinch at his bald accusation, yet I still do as he orders. And as I face him, the sarcasm drenching his voice also twists his lush mouth. But even that mocking thing of a smile doesn’t reach his eyes. No, they’re blank canvases of gray sleet and ice. Opaque, muddy, and… nothing.
My fingers remain curled around the doorknob, much like a shipwreck victim clinging to the shattered debris of a mast. It’s keeping me grounded, afloat. Protecting me from diving into unchartered waters and swimming toward this suddenly unfamiliar…vulnerablestranger to wrap my arms around him. Comfort him.
Lunacy. That is the urge to cross the room and touch him. Absolute lunacy.
“Ask me.” His demand is nearly mangled by the low growl of his voice. “Ask me what you want to know.”
No, don’t give in. Don’t surrender another inch.There’s been too many intimacies exchanged between us. My sanity can’t afford another one. Too bad my curiosity hasn’t received the menu. That bitch is shameless.
And apparently, so am I.
“Why did she kill him?” I murmur. “Only tell me if you want to, Asad. Only if youneedto.”
Emotion flickers in his gaze, but it’s there and gone before I can decipher it, hidden behind that wall.
“If I need to?” He softly chuckles and shakes his head.
I almost tell him never mind; more than anyone, I understand the cost of allowing someone behind those barbed, guarded walls. Of wondering if you just handed your enemy a loaded gun with armor-piercing ammo.
Almost.
Because there’s this secret, hungry,clawingthing inside me that craves more of him. And it has nothing to do with his dick.
In all the years he’s been in my life, Asad has never understood the concept of personal space. Who am I kidding? He’s never given a fuck. And he doesn’t switch up on me now.
He stalks forward, his long, powerful legs aggressively eating up the distance until his big body towers over mine. It doesn’t escape me that only with him do I feel delicate, fragile… wanted.
And that kind of power is chains forged in titanium.
“Yeah, Ember, I need to. I need you to listen. You gon’ give that to me, ma?” That roughened-silk voice steals the breath from my lungs, but I nod. His lips momentarily flatten into a grim line before he dips his chin in response. His head lowers, and when he speaks again, his mouth brushes my ear. “What Michelle wants, she gets. You should know that better than anyone. She set her sights on Marcus, and fucking him behind my father’s and your mother’s backs wasn’t enough. Not when she could be Mrs. Marcus Cross and have access to the lifestyle that came with it.”
Shock ripples through me, and I lightly shake my head as if attempting to shake free the low, insistent buzz gathering in my head.
“Marcus was having an affair with Michelle?” I rasp.
“He married her only three months after your mother died. You can’t possibly be that naïve, baby girl.”
Naïve? No. In denial and clinging to the last tattered vestiges of hope that maybe, just fuckingmaybe, Marcus wasn’t as much of a soulless piece of shit as my suspicions whispered? Yeah.
But in seconds, Asad stripped those busted and warped rose-tinted glasses away.
Goddamnhim. Godda—I gasp, horror and a sharp agony striking me in the chest so hard my hand releases the doorknob and splays over heart.
“Did he…?” The thought crashes against my skull, loud and angry. But my throat cinches closed around the words. I can’tsqueeze them past the constriction. I lick my lips and try again. “Did he ki—”
“Did Marcus kill your mother?” Asad raises his head, cocks it as he stares down at me, his dark, thick brows arrowed down over his arctic gaze. “No, not that I’m aware of. Marcus might’ve been a shit husband who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and didn’t know a mu’fucking thing about through sickness and health, but he didn’t murder her. But when Michelle became aware of your mother’s cancer diagnosis, she became a widow within months. One day, my father was healthy, and the next, he was a walking skeleton throwing up blood and pissing on himself.” A smirk rides his mouth, but a gloriously hot fury sears away the ice from before. “The truly fucked-up part? Toward the end, I believe my father knew she was poisoning him. It was in his eyes—this sad, almost resigned knowledge. But instead of saying anything to the doctors, shit,to me, he lay in that hospital bed, wasting away. She played the grieving-widow part to perfection. No one suspected. Just me. But she knew I wasn’t a threat. She knew I would keep her fucking secret.”
