Page 87 of The Kingpin’s Bride

“Careful.”

I met her eyes. “Because if I’m not careful, I won’t be able to hold back, and there’s a kid here now. And you’re bleeding.”

She touched the cut on her cheek self-consciously. I set my own plate aside. “Stay still.”

I went to the drawer by the sink and took out the small kit I kept there for nights that ended in blood. Antiseptic. Gauze. Steri-strips. She stayed on the stool. The cut sat high on her cheekbone, shallow but ugly, already starting to dry at the edges. Someone else’s night had written itself across her face. I soaked a square of gauze and stepped in until my knees almost touched hers.

“This will sting.”

I pressed the gauze to the cut. She hissed once through her teeth and didn’t pull away. Up close she smelled like cold air and blood and the jacket I had put on her in the trees. Her pulse jumped under the skin of her throat where the collar used to sit.

I cleaned until the gauze came away pink instead of red. Then I tore open a steri-strip with my teeth and smoothed it down with my thumb, careful not to drag.

“You’be been through worse, baby” I said quietly. “You don’t get to flinch at this.”

“I’m not flinching.”

“You’re holding your breath.” She let it out. It warmed the side of my wrist.

I taped a second strip across the first and sat back just far enough to look at the work. Clean. Straight. It would scar thin if she left it alone.

“There.”

Her fingers came up and touched the edge of the tape, then dropped again. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes I did.” I tossed the used gauze into the sink. “Your sister is asleep twenty feet away. You’re bleeding on my kitchen stool. And if I put my hands anywhere else right now I won’t stop, and I already told you I’m not touching you like that while you are still shaking standing up.”

She stared at me like she was waiting for the other version of me to come back. The one from the stage. The one from the hallway. I washed the blood off my hands in the sink and didn’t look at her throat. If I did, the careful part of me would be finished.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Morena

“Still hate me?” he asked, voice hoarse.

I looked at him. At the blood drying on his shirt. At the open, terrified look in his eyes that he was trying very hard to hide. At the man who had bought me, collared me, killed for me, and then cooked for me like any of it could make up for the rest.

The truth came out before I could stop it.

“No,” I whispered. “I love you.”

He went completely still. For a second he just stared at me like the words were a foreign language.

“Don’t,” he said, low and dangerous. “Don’t say that. Take it back. You don’t get to say that. Not after everything. Not after I bought you. You don’t get to look at me with my cum dripping out of you and say you love me like it’s simple.”

“It’s not simple,” I said. “It’s the most complicated, stupid, painful thing I’ve ever felt. But it’s true.”

“Stop.”

“I love you.”

“Rena.”

“I loved you when I put the knife to my throat,” I whispered. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have done that. I love you even though you’re a controlling, possessive, emotionally constipated bastard who has no idea what to do with it.”

He made a rough sound and turned away. Both hands braced on the opposite counter. His shoulders were rigid. I could see the muscle jumping in his jaw.

“You can’t love me,” he said, voice cracking. “Do you understand that? I am not a man people love. I am the man who ends things. I am the man who puts bullets in heads and buys women and keeps them on schedules so I never have to feel a thing.”