Page 181

“Yeah.”

My face burns. My ears feel hot. I want to put my hands over them. “Then why aren’t you mad?”

“Because you’re scared to tell me for a reason.” His voice stays even. Not warm, exactly, but level. “And I’d rather understand the reason than punish the lie.”

That almost makes me cry again. My vision blurs at the edges, and I press my lips together until it stops. “I just don’t want…” My words trail away.

I can’t finish.

I don’t know how to say that if I give him Steven’s last name, something will happen.

Adrien is not a man who hears about an old abuser and moves on with his day.

Part of me wants Steven to be afraid.

A dark, ugly little part of me wants him to know what it feels like to hear footsteps coming and realize nobody is going to save him.

But another part—the younger part, maybe—is afraid of what happens if I finally let somebody choose me over him.

Adrien kisses my forehead. “You don’t have to tell me today.”

I nod.

He shifts me slightly higher against his chest. “But someday?”

I hesitate. “Maybe…”

“That’s enough then.”

We sit like that for a little longer—his hand splayed wide across my back, mine fisted loosely in his shirt—until my body stops feeling like it is waiting for the next blow. Until my shoulders come down from around my ears and I stop counting the seconds between one breath and the next.

Then Adrien’s gaze flicks toward where he pushed the box earlier, and I tense up again.

Immediately, his eyes return to me. Nothing else moves—just his eyes, cutting back from the box to my face before I’ve finished flinching. “I’m not asking you to use it.”

I nod slowly, letting myself believe him one word at a time. “Okay.”

“But I have an idea.”

That sounds dangerous in an entirely different way.

“What is it?”

Adrien reaches down and retrieves the box, then sets it next to us before holding out his bare hand to me.

My eyes dart from his face to his outstretched hand and back again. “What?”

A faint, almost imperceptible smile tugs at the corner of Adrien’s mouth. “You heard me.”

“You want me to paint your nails?”

“Yeah.”

I genuinely do not know what to do with that sentence.

My eyes move over him—the thick, corded muscle of his forearm, the dark stubble along his jaw, his broad shoulders and strong chest that strain against his shirt. He is forty years old. A former Navy SEAL. A professional killer-slash-kidnapper.

There are scars mapping his skin like topography of violence; he almost always seems to have a weapon on him, and his prosthetic arm looks like it could be classified as one.