Page 37 of Craving Sin

He nods, and watches me the whole time like he’s learning something, like he doesn’t know how to shave and I’m teaching him. It’s unnerving but also makes goose bumps travel up and down my skin, make it heat in ways that I really shouldn’t feel.

He steps out again while I get dressed and then I meet Rian in the room. “I’ll help you get a shirt on.” There are two suitcases full of clothes that his friend brought. I find a button-up shirt, since that would be easier, then make my way to Rian. He’s standing by the bed now, gun sticking out of the waistband of his pants.

My gaze flicks to it, then back to Rian’s face again, and he pulls it free, setting it on the bed. “You don’t like guns?”

“Not particularly.”

“Have you ever shot one?”

“No.” I shake my head. “And I don’t want to, either.”

“Good.”

I frown, not having expected that to be his response, but then, it seems I never know what to expect from Rian.

I lift my arms and begin working the sling free. “How old were you when you first shot one?” From everything he’s said, I’ve gathered that what he does is a family business, something that was passed down to him from his father. Is his son involved too? Did Rian bring Cillian into this angry, violent world he lives in?

“Four,” he says.

“Jesus.”

“It is what it is. My father had me kill my first man at eight.”

My hands stop moving, resting against him as though I’m frozen in place. I feel the walls of my heart soften, like that one admission is breaking down the protective case I keep around it—that I always have, not just because of Rian.

I don’t want to feel sorry for him, but I do. “Eight?” I ask, as though I didn’t hear him correctly.

“Yes. My father hated him. He brought me into a room with the man tied to a chair. He was bloody and beaten when my father handed me the gun and told me to kill him. I stalled for a moment because, well, I was a fucking child, but I understood what death meant, and I knew it was coming.”

“How?”

“It’s who my father was. My brother had been even younger, though he’d asked if he could do it.”

My hands fall away at that, heart slamming against my chest with the force of an out-of-control freight train. His brother had asked, and his father had let him?

“If you think I’m bad, you would have hated Sloan. He’s dead now, though. But yes, I knew what was expected, so I did it.”

“And you’ve been doing it ever since,” I add.

“Yes,” Rian replies. “Are you going to finish, or do I have to do this myself?”

“An hour ago, you didn’t want help cooking breakfast, and now suddenly, you’re okay with it?” I’m not sure where the levity of my comment comes from. I guess I just need it in this moment.

“I’m a complicated man. What can I say?”

He’s right about that. I never saw myself as complicated. I thought I was pretty simple, but the way I’m being with him has me wondering if I’m more complicated than I’d realized.

I don’t respond to his question, not that I expect he wants me to, and finish removing his sling. I can’t get what he said out of my head, though, the things he’s done, what his father made him do when he was nothing more than a child. What is that—second or third grade?

How…sad. He never had a chance to be anything other than what he is.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

It seems I don’t need to tell him that I’m apologizing for how he was raised and what he was forced to do because Rian says, “I know. You would be. That’s who you are.”

“That’s who most people are.”

“Not most people who have been kidnapped and held against their will.”