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“Are you okay?”
I nodded at his gentle question.
He cupped my cheek in his palm. “Want to finish the conversation back in the living room? Or are you happy to stay here in the bathroom?”
A soft chuckle slipped from me, accompanied by a crazy urge to lean forward and kiss him. That he could make me laugh at this point in our surreal adventure swept a warm wave of what could only be called happiness through me.
Crazy, indeed.
“Let’s try the living room,” I said.
He straightened to his feet with that inordinately fluid grace and latent strength of his and helped me to mine. There was no denying how nice his hand holding mine felt. How…right.
We walked back to the living room without talking. I hugged myself the whole way. Mainly because I wanted to take his hand again but knew if I did, any hope I had of getting through all this rationally would be gone.
The man was nothing like the annoying, arrogant bad boy I’d long believed him to be. He was also right about me not being gay, damn him. Accepting that was already beginning to erode my ability to deny what I felt for him.
And what I felt for him was…too raw and powerful and scary to contemplate, let alone surrender to.
Sinking onto the very sofa Doctor Winchester had tended to Lucas’s medical situation, I continued to hug myself as I watched Lucas lower himself onto the sofa on the other side of the coffee table.
“So, I am,” he said, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on my face, “or was a C.I. for a corrupt cop completely obsessed with fucking me. He’s blackmailing me to feed him everything I can on the Trinity, or he’ll make sure you’re exposed to the kind of people I don’t want to even know you exist. The Trinity will kill me if they know all the recent takedowns and arrests of their members are because of the intel I’m giving Dewey, and I’m still fighting on the underground MMA circuit, placing bets on the outcomes that would see me dead if anyone knew.”
“You’re gambling on your fights?” I didn’t know anything about underground fighting, but something about that sounded way too risky. Possibly dangerous. As if Lucas needed more danger in his life. “Why?”
“To get out. To have enough money to make sure you’re not in danger.”
“Lucas…” I murmured. I didn’t know what else to say.
We stared at each other, as if under a spell. The urge to move to his side, no, to straddle his lap and wrap my arms around his body, to kiss him, rushed through me. I let out a soft breath.
With a ragged sigh, he scrubbed his balled fists on the tops of his thighs. “I never planned to stay in Trinity, or to become a C.I. I’d always seen my MMA fighting as a means to an end—to make enough money that one day I could buy a house. Ask you out, on a date, a real date. Take you to the movies. Maybe even a cruise. Exist like normal people. That’s all I wanted. From the second I met you, I wanted a normal life with you. I knew that was never going to happen while I was letting Dewey or Trinity control me. So, over a period of time, I sent everything I had, everything I knew about Trinity and Dewey to a mutual acquaintance I have with Lila Winchester. That acquaintance now has in their possession the ability to tear Trinity apart and see Dewey end up in prison for a long fucking time.”
“Why isn’t he there yet?” I asked, although the words were barely more than a scratchy whisper. “Why did you…how did you end up in my bed, like you did? Did you get found out?”
Lucas closed his eyes at my question and dropped his head, clawing his fingers over his scalp.
“I got impatient,” he said without looking up at me. “Every day you were at risk, every day my mom and stepdad were in danger…it was eating at me, ripping at what I had left of a soul. Despite having suspicions that Dewey wasn’t the only fucker on the force with his own agenda, I went to the cops. Took a chance and spoke to a detective there called Kitchner. Told him everything.”
He finally lifted his head. The haunted, furious look in his eyes chilled me.
“That night—the night I ended up in your bed—I was grabbed off the street on my way to a fight, taken to the same abandoned warehouse by the river that Dewey took Lucille, and was beaten to an inch of my life.”
A dust storm filled my mouth. A vice clamped my chest. “Who…who grabbed you?”
“Cops. And Trinity members. It turns out some cops and Trinity members are friendlier with each other than most.”
I tried to swallow the dust storm. I failed.
“They drugged me,” he went on, holding my gaze. “Tortured me. Told me when they were done with me, they were coming for you. That they were going to take turns raping you in front of me until I told them who else I’d spoken to.”
My stomach lurched. I seriously feared I was going to throw up. Really throw up.
“I didn’t tell them anything. What I did do…” He looked away. Ground his teeth. “Let’s just say I got away and leave it at that. But I now know Dewey isn’t alone. I now know Kitchner is in on it. The fact
he was there, taking his own turn beating me kind of sealed that deal.”
“Wh-what are you going to do?”
