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“It’s okay,” I breathed into his ear. “You can let yourself go. It’s okay. It’s safe.”
It was the opposite of safe, but I knew what was holding him back. Finally, he pushed his arms under my body, holding me as tight as he could as he shook and roared in my ear, thrusting into me so hard and so high it was like I could feel him in the back of my throat. He shook in my arms, almost like he was crying. The muscles of his back twitching. His face, sweaty and damp against mine, and I held him tight. Hard. Memorizing every single detail because I knew it would be a fight to get him back in my arms.
“Poppy,” he breathed, trying to lift himself away from me.
“Stay,” I said, holding him as hard as I could, but in the end my strength was nothing compared to his. My love was nothing compared to his will. He ducked out from under my bound arms and rolled off of me, letting me go, and the cold air of the cabin was freezing on my wet and bruised body. I shook once, like a flinch, and he made a noise in his throat, finding the edge of a blanket on the foot of the bed and covering me with it. His fingers traced the edge of the fabric that bound my hands. He touched the splatters of blood one by one.
Something about finally having sex with him felt…violent. We’d changed everything between us, and change that profound only came by way of brutality. Finally, he pulled the knot loose and unbound me, the fabric tossed onto the floor. I immediately felt the lack, my wrists colder than the rest of my body.
“Are you all right?” he asked, quietly.
“Fine,” I croaked, my voice ruined. “You?”
He laughed once low in his throat and I looked at his profile, so sharp in the dark. You were inside me. You came inside me. I might at this very moment be pregnant. Almost unconsciously I tipped my hips, curled my knees up like I could hold his sperm inside of me. He looked over at me like he knew what I was doing.
A baby. We might have made a baby when we were hardly a couple. What kind of disaster was this? He will not love me. I knew that. He would never allow himself to love me and so I had to stop myself, right now, from loving him.
“That won’t happen again,” he said. “It can’t.”
I wrapped the blanket around me, shifting to stand up despite the sting and ache in my body. Between my legs I was wet and sore and I needed a shower. And a good long cry. I needed my sister and a change of clothes and some goddamned underwear.
“Poppy,” he murmured.
“I’m going to take a shower.”
“Are you all right?”
I turned and looked at him, my heart straining out of my grip. He was so beautiful. So tortured and still. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked. “I’m your wife.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ronan
The first man I killed, I only knew his name. David Allen. And I knew he owed the wrong people—in this case, my boss—money. And there were rumors he’d been talking to the PSNI to get out of some trouble. And rumors like that were a death sentence. Enter me. I was seventeen years old and the gun I’d been handed by Ronald McMurphy was huge in my hand. A cartoon gun, like.
And I’d felt like a right proper mobster.
Like a terrible cliché, I broke into David Allen’s kitchen in the dead of the night.
But climbing the stairs past all those pictures of his parents and the wife who’d just left him, I thought about my da’s head bent in the rain and how the fireplace in our old house smelled like cedar and wet socks. And I had to pee so bad I thought I wouldn’t be able to control it.
That I’d put a bullet in David Allen’s head and one in his hand (a little calling card from my boss as warning to any other scumbag thinking of talking to the PSNI—something about the hand that feeds you) and I’d piss myself.
Ronald would fucking kill himself laughing if I came back with that gun and smelling of piss.
David Allen had heard me on the steps and he’d woken up. When I came in he had the lamp on and he was reaching for something on his bedside table and I was sure it was a gun and so I didn’t give him the tough-guy speech I’d had all worked up in my head. I just put a bullet in him. Cold as ice. And I thought I was something. Killing this man. Doing the job.
Wasn’t I something?
When I stepped forward to put the bullet through his hand, I saw that he’d been reaching for a pair of glasses on the nightstand and I ran to the bathroom to throw up. That night I went home to my shitty apartment with all the locks and I did something I’d never done before. I prayed. I prayed for someone to come at that moment and do the same thing to me that I’d done to David Allen.
