Page 32 of Bound

“I’m sorry, Pixie. You’re mistaken about that. I mean it.”

Jayd drew in air on painful lungs. Well, now she was irked—in all the violent senses of the word.

“Says who?” she jabbed. “You and that grand jury behind you, my friend?”

“Don’t need a jury.” He channeled his darkness into a strange and troubling ease. “Life handed down my verdict a long time ago. I’ll be in solitary for the rest of my life. You know a lot of that origin story already.”

Her breaths were still acts of agony. She showed him just how much by letting the sting behind her eyes turn liquid.

“A lot of the story is not all of it,” she sobbed out. “If Asha hurt you that badly—”

“Christ,” he muttered. “I’ll only say this one more time, okay? It wasn’t her. It’s never been her.”

She compressed her lips, holding back a string of frustrated profanity. “Respectfully speaking, that still tells me nothing.”

One of his brows cocked. While lowering it, he hauled in a labored breath. “Tell me… Did you like everything we did in Paris, princess?”

Princess. There it was again, more awful and despicable than before. “I believe you already know the answer to that, Sir.”

Sir. Capital S this time, communicated by her hard emphasis. Though the man’s features hardly shifted, she sensed she had gotten past his thick skull this time.

“Adept answer,” he stated. “Registered and accepted.”

She nodded, unable to dim a subtle preen. “Merderim.”

“But if we were having this conversation in my normal world, in my real life, it would’ve gotten your ass reddened.”

It was a nice preen while it lasted. “Pardon me?”

“All of that…in Paris…was only wood shavings on my normal playing board.” His answer was more brutal to bear because he changed not a millimeter of his stance. If anything, he seemed huger now. Crueler. “Hard lives spit out hard men, sweetheart. You have to know by now that I’m one of them. And goddammit, how I wish that were some trite excuse to save your feelings, but it’s not. It’s my truth, and it’s not going to change.”

He finally did move, but only to fold his arms across the expanse of his chest. His gaze intensified to a sharp cobalt shade.

“At some point, I thought there might have been hope for me,” he went on. “To get…gentler, I suppose. Once there weren’t so many pressures on all my edges, maybe they’d get rounded off, and I’d be okay for a woman to hold for longer than a few moments in time.”

He blinked. In that single second, everything about him changed again. His shoulders sagged. The thunderheads had returned to his eyes. “But when those chances came, I turned them all down. I ran from the bevels. I ran toward the knives and the axes. My edges became my definition, my security…”

“Your identity,” Jayd filled in, nodding softly. “Like your very namesake.”

His nod was more a harsh tic of his head. “I didn’t want to redefine myself. I liked it where I was, despite knowing what I’d be giving up to do it.” He hitched his shoulders with the same gruff brevity. “This is me, Jayd. I’m a hard man. On myself and on others.”

“Others.” Her echo was quiet but threaded with new understanding. “Including your lovers.”

“Not my lovers,” he bit out. “My fuck toys, Jayd. You getting a bit of meaning now? They’re my submissives. My servants, there to obey me no matter what I ask them to give or to do.”

More comprehension hit. “Like the people—the submissives—in that place we went to,” she said. “The dungeon.”

Which had been just that, in so many senses. More than what she might have fully understood…until now.

“Yes,” Brickham replied. “Like that place.”

“Which was why you knew exactly what to do when we got there,” she returned. “And why they almost seemed to know you. To respect you.”

He hauled in another long breath. “It was more than just kinky cordiality. Bastille—the name on the card I showed the other Master in Paris—isn’t just a dungeon I belong to. It’s the club I own, Jayd.”

Her reaction to that was instantaneous—but not unexpected. The sprint of her heartbeat was not one of shock. The new knowledge in her mind was revelatory, not revolting. The expression he was clearly dreading, of her scandal and horror, was not going to happen. Instead, she faced what she had been so ardently begging from him.

The honesty of her heart.