“Because I love you,” I said. “And I can’t lie to you.” My voice came out wrecked. “I had to tell you. Even the part that—” Igestured at myself, the whole of me, the killer, the thing she’d never met. “Even that.”
She didn’t run.
I’d been so sure she would.
But she didn’t. She was furious and she was crying and her knuckles were white on the blanket, but she was still here.
“The thing you are,” she said, quieter now. “The family.” She looked at my hands, lying flat and still on my knees where I’d set them like surrendered weapons. “You think it’s the dealbreaker. You laid it out like a confession waiting for the sentence.”
“It should be a dealbreaker,” I said. “Any sane woman—”
“I’m not a sane woman, Tonio, I run a failing bakery on four hours of sleep and spite.” The joke came up through the tears, sudden, devastating, and a laugh got punched out of me before I could stop it. “Don’t laugh, I’m being serious.” But the corner of her mouth had gone up, the near-smile, the standing ovation, even now, even through all of it. Then it dropped, and she was serious again. “I grew up next to violent men. I’m not naive about what they are. I knew there was a soldier in you weeks ago—I watched him come up the night of the car, the night you put yourself between me and the dark street. I’ve seen the wall. I just didn’t have the word for it.” She held my eyes. “You think the killer is the part I won’t be able to see past. But the killer is the part that’s been keeping me alive.”
“Katerina.”
“I’m angry,” she said. “I get to be angry. You can’t lie to me, but you know that.And I get a vote in my own war from now on, those are conditions, not requests.” Her voice had gone thick. “But I’m not running.”
The whole earth went quiet.
“Because I love you too.”
My heart was pounding.
She loved me. I’d shown her the worst of me, and she loved me.
She moved to me. Crossed the gap. The blanket slid off her shoulders and pooled at her waist and she came across the bed to me on her knees and fisted both hands in the front of my shirt and she kissed me.
And this was different.
This was just a mouth on my mouth and her breath gone ragged and her fingers white in my shirt, two people who’d both finally set everything aside to be together. I felt the difference go through me like a current reversed. She wasn’t handing me anything. She wasn’t taking anything either. She was just here, choosing me with her whole shaking body, the truth out and nothing left to hold back.
My hands came up to steady her—the reflex, the Daddy in me reaching to slow it, to take the reins, to make it mine to give—and she pulled back and looked at me and stopped me with one word.
“No.” Soft. Not the boss. Not surrender. Something underneath both. “Not like that. Not this time.” Her eyes were wet and dark and dead level. “You don’t run this one. I’m not your Little right now. I’m not handing you anything to hold. I’m just a woman who knows exactly what you are and wants you anyway.” Her hands flattened against my chest. “Like this.”
And she started on my buttons.
I let her. God help me, I let her. She pushed the shirt off my shoulders and I shrugged out of it, and there I was, bare to the waist in the gray light, all of it on display—the tattoos, the Madonna over my heart, the piece for my father along my ribs, the scarred knuckles, the boxer’s body, the whole record of the life written on my skin where she could finally read it.
I reached for the hem of her top and she lifted her arms and I drew it off her, slow, and then there was nothing between us. Thered lace I’d chosen for her yesterday, gone. Just her, flour-strong and tired-eyed and beautiful, and me, the killer she loved.
I have been looked at by a lot of women. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I have never in my life been looked at the way she looked at me then—not at the charm, not at the body as a thing to be had, but at me, the whole of me, the tattoos that told the truth and the hands that had done what they’d done. She put her palm flat over the Madonna on my chest, over my heart, where the thing was going like I’d run somewhere.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
“I’m a thug,” I told her, because I couldn’t help it, because she had to keep knowing, because I needed to watch her keep choosing it.
“Yes.” She didn’t flinch. Her hand stayed on my heart. “A beautiful thug.” And she said it the way you’d a fact, a thing settled and true, and it went through me hard and cold, all the way down to a place I’d boarded up so long ago I’d forgotten the room was there. “I’m not afraid of you, Tonio. Not even a little bit.”
Then her hand left my heart and slid down, over the piece for my father, over the muscle of my belly, and lower, and she found my cock through the soft cotton I’d slept in and then under it, her fingers wrapping around me, warm and sure, and she made a sound when she felt how hard I already was for her—a low groan, surprised, hungry—and I damn near came apart right there in her hand like a boy.
“Christ,” I said. The word got torn out of me.
She started to move her hand. Slow. Gentle, a long unhurried stroke, the same hands that kneaded the dough and hauled the flour and lettered nothing and commanded everything, and the gentleness of it was worse than any roughness could’ve been, the deliberate care of it, her watching my face the whole time, reading me the way she’d learned to read a room, finding therhythm that made my breath catch and holding to it. The furnace I’d banked every dawn for three weeks roared up the whole length of me. I gripped the sheet. I, who held the line, who held everyone’s line—I gripped the sheet and let her hold me in her hand and stroke me slow and watch what it did.
I got my mouth to her ear. I had to tell her. The truth had been coming out of me all morning and it wasn’t done.
“I want you,” I said, low, wrecked, my voice gone to gravel. “You have to understand—I’ve never—” The man who never runs short of words, reaching again, finding the true one. “I’ve had everything I ever wanted handed to me on a smile. My whole life. Bartenders, bored wives, the whole world opening for me because I’m charming. And I’ve never wanted any of it. Not one thing. Not really.” Her hand stilled, listening. “And then you.” Her breath had gone shallow against my jaw. “I want you, Katerina. I have never wanted anyone, anything, the way I want you. It scares the hell out of me.”
