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Malice probably doesn’t want to even look at me right now, and if I go to find him, I have no idea what he’ll do or what will happen. He’ll probably blame me for the loss of the deal with the Donovan gang, pissed that my presence made the deal go south, even though he’s the one who forced me to come here in the first place.
I know all of that…
And yet, I still want to see him anyway.
Maybe I have a fucking death wish.
Following the direction I heard his heavy footsteps disappear in, I head into the garage and find him sitting in a little room set off from the main space. I haven’t really been in here before, but it looks like a sort of all-purpose space, with workout equipment, a desk, and a work bench with a bunch of tattoo equipment on it.
Malice is sitting on one of the benches in the middle of the room, his elbows braced on his knees as he leans over, a glass of whiskey dangling from his fingers.
A lamp on the workbench illuminates the space in dim, warm light, and I close the door behind me with a soft click, leaning my back against it. I can tell he knows I’m here, but he doesn’t look up at first. He sips from his glass, and I can just make out the sight of him glaring down at the whiskey like he wants to set it on fire with his gaze.
My mouth feels dry, and I have to speak past the knot in my throat.
“Thank you,” I whisper finally.
His lips curl. “I told you not to thank me for shit.”
“I know. It’s just…” I swallow. “Men have always treated me badly. Almost every man I’ve ever known. And no one has ever stood up for me before.”
Malice snorts, shaking his head. When he looks up at me, I can see the lingering anger burning in his eyes. There’s a hard expression on his face, and it’s weird how it suits him. It looks at home on his face, bringing out the striking harshness of his cheekbones and those dark gray eyes.
“I also told you not to make me a hero. I’m no different from any of those other men,” he says, and for once, he doesn’t sound completely pissed off. Just tired and a little bitter. “I warned you not to do this,Solnyshka. You’re making me out to be some kind of fucking knight, and I’m not. I never will be.”
It’s basically the same thing he said the last time I thanked him, just with a different tone, and now that I have a clearer picture of who he is, I know it’s both true and not true. He’s threatened to kill me so many times, and he takes what he wants without asking.
He’s definitely not a good man, and I can’t really pretend like he is.
He would have killed me in a second the first time we met, if Ransom hadn’t stepped in. If I’d put a toe out of line before, he would have hunted me down and made me pay for my transgression, and he probably wouldn’t have spared a second thought about it.
Malice doesn’t hesitate to do bad things when they need to be done, and he does them fiercely and brutally.
But at the same time, that’s not all there is to him.
I’ve seen little glimpses of who he is under all that brutal anger. Under all the rage. He’s done all these other things to help me and protect me—even at the expense of things he should want more. Like earlier tonight, when he attacked a member of the gang they wanted to make a deal with, just because the guy touched me and said something creepy.
I turn all of that over in my mind for a long moment, silently thinking.
“You’re right. Maybe you’re not a knight,” I whisper finally. “But maybe… maybe I don’t need a white knight. Maybe I need something darker.”
Before that awful frat party, I would have thought Colin was the white knight type. I thought he was clean cut and nice, someone harmless, someone I could trust to not hurt me. And in the end, he was worse than someone like Malice, who’s been up front about who he is from the beginning.
My words have an instant effect, and Malice’s head snaps up.
He looks at me sharply, then sets his glass down and rises from the bench in a smooth motion. He stalks toward me, his long, muscled legs eating up the distance between us with powerful strides. I freeze like a statue as he stops less than a foot from me, staring up at him almost helplessly.
Everything about Malice is so raw and carnal, and he fills the space between us with his dominating presence, making it hard to breathe or focus on anything but him and how close he is.
He grips my chin, and I can feel the callouses on his fingers, rough against my skin as he tilts my head up. He’s a lot taller than me, but when he drops his head, our faces are so close together that his breath fans over my skin, and I can smell the whiskey on it. I don’t move, I barely even breathe, staring up at him as tension grows and fills the tiny space between us.
“Be careful what you wish for,Solnyshka,” he murmurs. “You say all that shit about wanting a dark knight, but I don’t think you really understand what that means. I could break you so easily. I coulddestroyyou.”
It’s definitely not the first time he’s threatened me, and it probably won’t be the last.
But this… this is different from the other times.
This isn’t a threat of him killing me, like it’s been in the past. This isn’t him telling me what will happen if I step out of line and rat them out or refuse to do what he says.
