Page 269 of Coal Hearts

Tied to the maypole.

Taken so damn hard because the moment I sank inside her, I couldn’t stop.

Ily sucked in a breath on the lawn.

My skin itched.

I didn’t want her seeing that.

But then again, she’d already seen me at my weakest. Acted along with me at my dumbest. She’d not only obeyed me, but I had a sneaking suspicion she felt sorry for me.

My fingers dug into my biceps as I crossed my arms tighter. I went to lie. To blame something I ate or jet lag or exhaustion, but...I didn’t want to lie anymore. Not because five guards inconspicuously joined us on the deck, fanning out with their hands hovering over concealed weapons but because I’d changed last night and didn’t want to undo that change.

I liked my freedom far too fucking much to turn my back on it.

“So, Henri?” Victor canted his head. “Do you have an explanation for this one?” He scowled. “Were you throwing up from fucking your jewel or for giving me two million euros for the privilege?”

A man snickered. “Nothing worse than forking over cash you don’t have, huh?”

“Knew he was an idiot.” Someone chuckled.

“Neither.” I smiled. Genuinely. Full of goddamn relief that that little malady was a thing of the past.

“Pray tell,” Victor murmured.

“My guts have always been sensitive. I told you that last night. I guess you could say my body took it upon itself to keep me from straying.”

“Straying?”

“Into the dark.”

“So this is you purging the darkness of rape?”

I shot a look at Ily, needing her to see my face when I confessed, “It wasn’t rape. She consented.”

Another ripple of laughter was followed by a hissed gasp from Ily.

Peter didn’t look up, but his entire body tensed.

Glancing back at Victor, I flung open my rotten pages and became an open fucking book. “When I whispered to her...I might have said some things that made her play along with me.”

“Such as?” Victor narrowed his eyes.

I dabbled with stepping over the line of who Ily thought I was, but Victor didn’t need to know. That part of the pantomime was over. Ily would’ve figured out I wasn’t a cop after what I did last night.

I’d never been one. Would never become one.

That knowledge would hurt her almost as much as my switchblade.

That reminds me...I left it in Victor’s dead zoo.

I wanted it back as a keepsake for the night I awakened.

“I told her if she behaved, I wouldn’t let anyone else have her. I asked her to trust me. That everything I did to her was for the greater good.”

Peter let out a tortured sort of noise.

Ily remained deathly silent.