Page 57 of A Vicious Love

“Can you? Because according to my sources, you have not married her.”

“No.”

“Or fucked her.”

The glass cracked in my hand. A thin line running through crystal beneath my palm. Damius looked at it, then back to me. I set it down very carefully.

“She was eighteen,” I said.

“I recall her age.”

“No, you didn’t.” My voice went low. “You heard numbers. I saw a girl.”

“A girl with valuable blood.”

“A girl,” I snapped. “Standing next to Harlan’s monster because you needed press photographs.”

Damius stared at me.

I leaned forward, palms on the bar. “And I made sure the world knew I wasn’t fucking an eighteen-year-old because I’m a bastard, not a cliché in one of Harlan’s dirty little family rooms.”

“For the bloodline,” he corrected.

“She was barely out of school.”

“She was old enough under law.”

“Law is what weak men hide behind when they know morality won’t survive daylight.”

“Careful, Jamison.”

I smiled without warmth. “I haven’t been careful in years.”

“No,” he said. “That is increasingly apparent.”

I lifted the cracked glass and finished the whiskey anyway. Damius watched that too. He watched everything. The old bastard would know exactly what each of his grand sons were doing in this moment.

“Your restraint would be admirable,” he said, “if it were not attached to negligence.”

I slammed the glass down.

It broke this time. One clean fracture, then another. Whiskey spread over the bar. I didn’t give a fuck. I was not in the mood for this conversation. Though. When it came to her. I was never in the right mood.

“Don’t dress this up as concern for Sienna.”

“Sienna,” he said.

The sound of her name in his mouth made my hand curl. I hated that something possessive moved in me despite the fact I had spent years trying to keep that exact instinct starved.

“Interesting,” His eyes flicked to my hand.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever fucking experiment is running behind your eyes.”

“You made that girl stand next to Harlan’s monster for press. Your words. Not mine.”