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My blood runs cold. My throat tightens.
A tornado spins wildly through my emotions.
“Took care of them?”
“Whatever needed to be done.”
I struggle to swallow past the cold ache.
He killed our Joey in cold blood.
Connor wasn’t lying. It was true. Ares worked for the De Kysa and killed Joey for them.
My voice is small. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I wasn’t lying when I said I fucking like you. I think there is something between us that is more than sex, right?”
After a pause, I nod. It’s all I can manage because inside, I am being torn in two.
My heart agrees with him while my head is screaming bloody murder.
He killed your brother.
He reaches up and tenderly brushes my hair from in front of my eyes. “So I need you to know who I am. Who you’re in bed with. Who’s inside you. And I want you to trust him and know he is never going to hurt you. I’m fucking falling for you, Rory, and I don’t want you to find out who I am and run away from me later. So, this is me. I’ve got blood on my hands from working for the De Kysa and blood on my hands working for the Kings. It’s who I am.” His face is an emotionless mask, but the emotion burns bright in his eyes. “My question… am I the kind of man you could fall in love with?”
My heart pounds wildly.
Yes, she cries.
But I can’t say the words because my throat is too tight with emotion.
All I can do is nod.
He crushes his lips to mine, and I kiss him back with a hunger I’ve never known. His hands roam everywhere, his tongue and lips kissing me into a dizzying high.
Ares doesn’t fuck me with the urgency he brought over with him tonight. This is different. Another wall has crumbled, and when he makes love to me, I can feel more walls dropping around us, and it makes it easier to get lost in him. To forget what is happening outside of our bubble.
Afterward, we listen to the rain against the windows, and when Ares falls asleep, I lie in tortured silence and listen to his gentle breath.
Tick tock, Aurora.
Surrounded by his infinite warmth, I fall into a deep sleep where nothing good resides, and all my dreams are nightmares.
We were at the beach. The little cove where my father used to take us on the weekends if he wasn’t busy with work. There were no waves, and I was standing at the shoreline, trying to skim rocks, but so far, none of them had danced across the water, they simply sank a few feet away.
I picked up another rock. But it sank too, and I hung my head with a sob.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rory, stop being such a crybaby,” my mother snapped behind me. I looked over my shoulder to where she was sitting in a beach chair, a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty glass of wine in the other. Her blonde hair was wrapped in a scarf Daddy brought back for her from one of his business trips, and she was wearing a sparkly top that glittered with a thousand silver stars in the sunlight. “And look at that bathing suit. You’re going to have to lay off the waffles and gelato if you want to wear things like that, Aurora.”
“Ariana, she’s nine years old,” my father said, refilling her wine glass. “She doesn’t need to hear shit talk like that… let her be a child.” He turned away from her and winked at me, his warm smile keeping the chill of my mother’s meanness at bay.
My father was a scary-looking man. His eyes burned with green flames, and bad words often fell from his thin lips, but they’d only ever said nice things to me. I knew men were afraid of him. But not me. He’d only ever been kind and loving to me. I was his princess.
But my mother wasn’t done with me.
“She’ll be two hundred pounds by then,” my mother scoffed, crossing her legs and taking a puff on her cigarette. “If she keeps eating the way she does, it will be like stuffing a piglet into a bikini come next summer.”
I turned away from her cruel comments. I didn’t want to look like a piglet in a bikini or whatever that meant. Anyway, what did she know? She was the one wearing a full face of makeup to the beach and enough gold she’d sink right to the bottom of the ocean if she fell in.
