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I watch the muscles in his back ripple in time with his breathing. Then I prod one with the tip of my thumb and marvel at the firmness. The heat. How he doesn’t cringe away from me like he should.
“Don’t go hunting,” I scold him softly.
“You’re right.” He grabs my wrist again, evoking a shiver that I feel all the way down to my toes. “I doubt much about you could turn me off, anyway.” His eyes flicker down my torso.
“Oh really?” I counter thickly. Any anger my voice might contain vanishes the longer I watch his larger fingers intertwine with mine. “Are you that big and bad? Father could be a mob boss for all you know.”
“Idoknow,” he says smugly. “Every mobster in the goddamn city, in fact. None of them has a daughter that looks like you.”
He could be lying, but a part of me warns he isn’t. For a brief moment, I toy with the idea of telling him the truth. Father is Michael Heywood, leader of Covenant and holy savior of the entire city.
“Is that why you stopped me?” I ask him instead. “Because I’m ‘not your type’?”
“No…” He lets me go, and his hand falls to the mat with a heavy thud. “I almost killed someone last night.”
I feel my entire body tense. Again, he could be lying, but something in his voice makes me doubt that. He sounds so damn tired. Empty.
So, I whisper, “Tell me.”
His gaze darts to mine as if he’s remembering I’m even here. Then he reaches out, and I inhale as his thumb finds my chin, stroking just below my lower lip. “I mean it. Fuck… I wanted to beat the shit out of him. I wanted him dead.”
“Why?” I counter, so soft I barely hear my voice slithering beneath his.
“Because… I could have stopped him,” he says without elaborating. “I could have. But then I’d be right back in the fucking thick of it, and I’ve fought too damn hard to get out the first time. I don’t want to be that person again. I can’t be…” His gaze darkens as he glares beyond me into some inner universe where I can’t follow. “So, I stopped myself. I pulled back. I let him win, but it’s like the universe can’t let me fucking be a coward for once.” He blinks, and when his eyes reopen, he’s seeing me again, deploying that unnerving stare. “It’s punishing me,” he says through gritted teeth. “So, fuck it. I’m done fighting. I’m going to Hell anyway.”
“Me too,” I find myself blurting out.
He laughs. Then he sighs. “I know what we could do.” He sits upright, with his back still to me. He reaches for a pile of crumbled clothing, and I flinch as he tosses a handful of fabric to me. My clothes. “We can get dressed. The gym has a shower—” He nods to a closed door at the back of the room. “Then we can go to my shitty ass apartment and fuck again. Or talk.”
He makes both sound equally appealing.
Besides, I’m already at rock bottom, and am too tired to start climbing now.
“Fine.”
SEVEN
He wasn’t lying.Only a few blocks down from the gym, his apartment lies inside a seedy building that just about fits the definition of “shitty”—especially given the soundtrack of sirens still blaring from another part of the city. Something big must have happened to cause such a racket for so long.
A catastrophe? A major accident? A tendril of fear directed toward Father slips in through the cracks in my psyche. We live near Cherry Lane, in the direction of the city the noise seems to be coming from.
“Hey, space cadet,” Daze snaps, intruding into my thoughts. “You coming, or what?”
I turn to find him holding open the door to the apartment building. He lives in one of the housing projects that I always thought resembled a prison, with rusted bars over the windows and paper-thin walls.
“You actually live here?” I wonder, raising my voice as much as I dare. Daze’s cocked head warns me that he caught every word.
“What?” He shrugs with feigned nonchalance while leading me up a narrow staircase to the top floor of the building. “You don’t like the ambient noise?”
Which currently consists of screaming children and blaring televisions.
I say nothing, and he takes his sweet time fishing a set of keys from his pocket. A second later, he’s shouldering open the door, leaving me to enter the apartment on his heels.
“Wow,” I find myself blurting with lackluster enthusiasm.
It’s cramped enough to feel like a box with just one person, let alone two. A ragged couch sits in the corner, opposite a minuscule kitchen. Empty beer cans litter the floor, mingled with piles of potato chip bags and takeout containers.
What a mess. Ironically, it’s the cleanest place I’ve been in a long time. Home feels soiled these days, filthy with old memories and emotional baggage.
