Page 48 of Vicious Betrayal

"You thought what?" His eyes search mine. "That I'd tell you to get rid of it?"

The question hangs between us. I can't answer. I can't confirm what I was hoping for, because saying it out loud makes me feel like a monster.

And at the same time, deep down, I'm relieved that he doesn't want me to do that. I feel like two different people, twisted together until I can't figure out where one begins and the other ends any longer. There's the part of me that cares deeply for him—is even falling in love with him—the part that wants to be with him, that might even want this baby with him, as inconvenient as it is even without all of the FBI shit complicating this. And then there's the part of me that just wants out, because doing this and knowing I'm going to hurt him so badly is destroying me.

His expression shifts, something like hurt flashing across his face before he locks it down. "Is that what you want? To end it?"

"I don't know." My voice breaks. "I don't know what I want. I'm twenty years old, Cormac. I'm not ready for this. I don't know how to be a mother. And you—you have your life, your work, and I'm just⁠—"

"Just what?" His hands slide from my shoulders to my arms, his touch gentling. "You're not just anything to me, Oksana. I think you know that."

"I…" I can't breathe. "You want this?"

He rubs his thumbs back and forth on my arms. "I think this is something I gave up wanting a long time ago, Oksana. But maybe there was a reason I let you into my life, against all my better judgment. Maybe you weren't just something unexpected. Maybe you were the upheaval I needed to let me have the things I never thought I'd be allowed."

His voice is so sincere, his gaze locked on mine, everything about this moment so heartfelt that it should break my heart for reasons entirely different from the ones that actually do.

"I need to think about some things," he continues. "My life was one thing ten minutes ago, and it could be something else now. I need to work that all out in my head, so I can give you the answers to everything that you need. And you need to think about what you really want, too. There are some conversations I'll need to have with Declan, with your father. But I don't want this to end, Oksana. And I don't want you to do anything about that baby except keep it, unless it's not what you want."

In that moment, I feel my world shatter. In any other situation, I'd feel more loved, more secure, more heard, seen, and cherished than I've ever felt in my life before. And the part of me that is seeing this separate from everything that's tangled up in it does. I feel like I'm mourning the chance to ever really experience this wholeheartedly, as my heart breaks because I know I have no out now. If he wants this, if he wants me, then I have no choice but to go forward and, in the end, betray him.

I'm a dagger aimed straight at his heart, and he's going to bleed for me willingly. And there's nothing I can do to stop it.

13

CORMAC

Dinner is mostly quiet. I can tell she's thinking, and I want to give her time with her thoughts before this goes any further. And to be completely honest, I need time with mine, too. After we're done eating, I tell her to let me clean up, and she says she's going to go take a bath. I listen to her footsteps go up the stairs, and I feel a weight settle over me heavier than anything I've felt in the last twenty years, which is quite a feat.

I stand by the sink with a dish towel in my hand, staring down at the cast-iron skillet I just rinsed, watching the last droplets of water bead against the black seasoned metal before disappearing down the drain. The faint scent of Oksana's perfume is still hanging in the air, mixed with the garlic and rosemary from dinner. I feel like my entire world has just been turned upside down.

A baby.

My baby.

I let out a slow, ragged breath, loud in the empty room, dropping the towel onto the counter and bracing both hands against the edge of the butcher block. My knuckles are pale against the dark wood, scarred and thick from a lifetime of violence. They’re the hands of a man who breaks things. A man who gets sent in when conversations fail, and blood is the only option left to fall back on.

All these years, I've told myself that some people get to have something to come home to at night, and others don't. I made choices, and those are supposed to have consequences. I thought I'd accepted them. The consequences for my choices, for the freedom I've bought with blood and violence, were a measure of loneliness. A bed that's never warm on the other side for very long. Never having someone who stays. Never hearing the laughter of children or seeing my features in someone else's face. And I told myself it was for the best, because having all of that means having ways someone else can hurt me. It means bringing other people into a life that is dangerous and uncertain and can be violent beyond belief. I've been that violent.

I could never have asked Oksana to join me in that life for any length of time. I could never have asked her to spend the rest of her life sitting across the breakfast table from a man who has blood he'll never wash out of the creases of his hands. But I couldn't keep her from coming into my life completely, because when she walked up to me in that club with her mouth full of that sharp wit and that body made for sin, determined to press itself up against mine, every single rule I ever wrote for myself went up in smoke.

I thought it was just lust. I've been lying to myself every single morning after she left my bed, telling myself it was nothing more than an itch. A middle-aged man’s pathetic weakness for youth and beauty and the recklessness of a twenty-year-old girl who didn’t know any better. I told Rian it was a fling. I told myself she’d get bored, that the reality of my quiet house and my routines would drive her back to the clubs and the pretty boys her own age within a month.

Instead, she crawled so deep into me that I can't draw a fucking breath any longer without tasting her.

Fuck, I love her.

I've thought it over the past days. Weeks, even. And I've shoved it down every time, because those words have no place in my life. I have no business saying them to her, of all people. But tonight, it was hardest of all not to say it, after she looked at me while clearly bracing herself for a cruelty I couldn’t have inflicted on her if my life depended on it.

She thought I was going to demand she get rid of the baby and get out of my life. That I was going to blame her when I'm just as clearly at fault. Birth control or no, I shouldn't have put it all on her. I should have put on a goddamn condom instead of losing myself to the pleasure of skin on skin like a stupid, reckless teenager.

Or… maybe I shouldn't have, after all. Because maybe this is my second chance.

A second chance. The phrase repeats in my head, over and over.

I’m forty years old. A lot of men in our line of work don’t make it to forty, and the ones who do are often even more bitter than I can be, turning to alcohol and other vices to numb the things they've seen and done. They don't expect to have families or even much of a future beyond the life they've built themselves into.

But now I have a woman who wants me. A woman who is carrying my child—the promise of a family that I'd convinced myself I was too ruined to deserve.