Page 26 of Dark Surrender

I dunno whether to laugh again, cry, or apologize. Though I don’t know what I’d apologize for. He’s going to die. A stab in the chest isn’t going to change that. Even if it wasn’t intentional.

He swallows his food before speaking. “For the record, I wasn’t tryin’ to hurt you. I saw you were about to trip over these.” Maxim nods toward the shackles and the bolt that holds them to the floor. “I was tryin’ to stop you.”

“And I made it worse.”

“Yeah.” Maxim grins and probes the two holes in his chest oozing blood. “But it could’ve been worse. Hell, it will be worse when your sister does whatever the fuck she did to Harold to me.”

“She won’t,” I promise.

“She won’t what? Spend hours torturing me to death?”

“I’ll make sure she makes it quick.” Dee will listen to me. I can’t let her hurt him like Harold. He doesn’t deserve that. Harold was slow. It was playtime.

“I appreciate that.”

“No problem.” I offer him a tight-lipped smile.

“So, you wear a wig,” he comments, eyeing my lack of hair.

Running a hand over my smooth head, I shrug like it’s not a big deal when it’s a huge one. “I have a form of alopecia.”

“So, no hair?”

“Nope.”

“Anywhere?”

“Nope. Not anywhere.”

Maxim whistles. “Damn.”

I laugh without humor. “Yeah. Damn.”

“Your eyelashes and brows?” he asks as if he’s genuinely curious, not judging.

“Fake.” I flick said lashes. “I glue on lashes, and when I have the time, I get my brows done professionally. If not, I do them myself.”

Maxim bobs his head as if he’s absorbing the information to think about later. Not that it matters, given where we are, yet somehow it matters to me. Which is dumb, I know. Nobody outside my sister and Dad has seen me without a wig, and he doesn’t look horrified, so that’s a plus, I guess.

“You’re beautiful either way,” he tosses out between bites of sushi.

Dark

Squeezing my eyes shut, I exhale hard.

Christ. I’m a fucking idiot.

“You’re beautiful either way.”

I sound like a douchebag. Ava doesn’t need my approval of how she looks. She knows she’s a smoke show. She doesn’t need a walking dead man, who can’t control his erection, to tell her how attractive she is.

I sound like a goddamn creeper.

Hell, this is my fault anyhow.

If I’d let her know she was gonna trip, then I wouldn’t have gotten stabbed, and she wouldn’t have mashed that incredible, curvy body against mine. I wouldn’t have gone from half-hard when seeing her to an uncontrollable erection, to her falling on her ass and losing her wig.

After listening to Harold die for fucking hours and Penelope sob for the bastard, I’m on edge. I can’t sit still. I’ve paced for who the hell knows how long, the few feet I can actually move, and then Ava shows up lookin’ as she does, and offering me a kindness with, from what I can tell, no ulterior motives. But what do I know?