Her voice breaks, but defiant. “Then let me go, Liam.”
My mouth is at her ear, my unexpected words scraping her skin.
“Not a chance.” I tsk. “Not a fucking chance.”
My mouth brushes the line of her jaw, tasting the salt of her tears. My grip slips from her wrists to her forearms, then lower, fingers grazing the inside of her elbow, her waist. Every tremor of her body shivers into me, feeding a hunger I can’t leash. Feeding a compulsion to break her more, to hear her whimper under my weight, under my hold, around her neck.
I want to own her, to throw her away and give her a taste of how desolate I feel. Let her swallow the pain I feel between my ribs from losing my brother. If she hadn't been in his life, he would’ve been more careful.
I shouldn’t allow myself to even loathe her because it’s as much of an intense feeling as love, and I’d never be capable of loving her. She lets out a moan that I want to swallow out of her.
I should pull back, but my mouth drags lower against her neck, and even though I can’t help myself, I pause because I want to know what she’d do with all the pain I have coming for her.
“Please, let me go, Liam,” she begs in a worked-up breath, and I don’t realize how tightly I am pulling her hair back, tipping her chin too close, her breath on my lips. I could spit in her mouth just to prove a point, but then the faintest arch of her back presses into me...
And that’s what does it.
I rip myself away so fast she falls forward into the sink. My cock throbs against my zipper, my throat raw from the betrayal I feel.
“Never walk into my world again,” I rasp, voice guttural. “Next time I won’t save you.”
I turn and leave her there, dripping, breathless, naked, already starved for what I denied her and denied myself.
Fifteen
Sara
Istare at my painful hands, contemplating how am I hanging off Liam’s sink. God help me, I was crying, not just from fear, but from the ache of him tearing himself away when I arched my spine against him. My body betrayed me in the worst way, begging for a need to be filled.
I’m so irreparably shattered, it terrifies me. How can my flesh crave his warmth when he’s the living inferno? How can I willfully stumble into his blaze? Grief rakes its claws across my chest and hammers in my skull, drilling me until I’d crawl onbroken glass to cut myself open, leaving me to find peace in his violence.
Bile rises in my mouth. Every step I take carries me farther from who I used to be. Now I am a hollow shell, like Liam, and maybe that’s why I’m here.
My skin still sears where his mouth touched. My hair aches where his fist yanked me close. My mind reels, frozen, from when he killed someone in front of me.
I try to rack my brain on where I left my phone, but it’s probably in the abandoned house.
Shit.
I want to call Artemis, Anne, or Mimi to ask if I can stay at their house, but I’m too panicked to be around anyone I know. I take a deep breath and look around, the familiarity of Joe envelops me, grounding me. I miss him so much, and when I look down at my hands, it’s not the burns that hurt…it’s my betrayal, it’s what Liam did to me, what I almost wanted him to do.
I hear his footsteps walking back to the kitchen. I startle and pick the blanket up to cover myself as he appears, his face is unreadable, cut from stone, unaffected by what just happened.
He hands me a sweatshirt and a white tube of cream, not sparing one glance at me, the quietest and most gentle violence I’ve ever seen.
“Put this on your hands and anywhere you have blisters. And wear the damn sweatshirt before you get sick on top of everything else.”
I blink at him.
“Why… why are you even helping me?” My voice cracks thin as glass as I pull the way-too-big sweatshirt over my head. It smells like him and fresh detergent.
His eyes cut sharply. “I shouldn’t be.” He steps closer.
“After what you saw, you should be running. You should be terrified of me.”
“I am,” I speak low, my throat burns, but not enough to leave apparently, because I ask him what I thought I’d never ask him.
“Ca- Can I stay tonight? I don’t want to be alone at home.” I shudder, rubbing my hands up and down my arms, and it doesn’t get lost on me that asking to stay in his house makesabsolutely no sense, but a part of me needs to stay near what’s left of Joe, his house and… his brother?
