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I stare harder at my father’s name, feeling Kieran settle on the ground beside me; I try not to lean into his side, to soak up the warmth he provides without feeling like I’m selling a piece of my heart in return.
We sit in silence, and I feel his hand reach over, gripping my knee in his large palm. “You’ve been ignoring me.”
I shrug, noting the way his jaw clenches. The harshness of his stance, the rigidity in his spine. Things meant to intimidate, but I’m not afraid of this man anymore.
“Want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here? Why I had to scour the entire fucking town, drawing attention to myself and the fact that I’m a fucking target?”
My eyes find his, the push and pull in my brain making my head throb. Of course, he’s a target in part because of me, but also because that’s the name of the game in King’s Trace. You can’t be a part of the crime without your own fair share of enemies. “Are you telling people we’re dating?”
He blinks, dragging his free hand through his dark brown locks; they tumble over his forehead, slightly curly from the humidity thick in the air. My fingers itch to bury themselves in his soft tresses, to get lost in him, but I shove them beneath my butt and refrain.
“No,” he draws out slowly, studying me with an unreadable expression. Blinking hard a few times, he shakes his head, turning so he faces me more. “Would that trouble you, if I were, though? I’m not gonna share you, Juliet, so if whatever we’re doing isn’t enough, then yeah. You can be my girlfriend.”
A humorless laugh falls from my lips. “Oh, great. I love the lukewarm sentiment.”
His lips flatten into a thin line, and his hand moves from my knee up my arm, wrapping around my bicep and tugging me toward him.Into him.I press my hands into his taut chest, keeping us apart enough that I can watch him. “Baby, nothing about us has beenlukewarmfrom the get-go. It went from a tiny spark, that flare of hatred mixing with desire that neither of us could really pin down, to me murdering someone in your defense. Risking everything for you. To you consuming my every waking thought, making my dick hard and my heart ache when I’m not around you. I can’t sleep without you lying next to me, can’t relax unless I know you’re safe. What’s lukewarm about that?”
“Nothing,” I whisper, bringing my thumb up and pushing it into the crease just beneath his plump lower lip. “That’s what scares me.”
“Kitten, I’m gonna need some clarification.”
Pulling away, I sit up straight and focus on the slab of granite in front of us. My chest feels tight, the tendons stretching against the pain bracketing them inside. “All I ever wanted was for my father tobea father. A normal one without any qualifying adverbs attached to the pronoun. I spent my whole life wondering why he couldn’t love me the way he did Caroline, only to find out a couple of years ago that the whole time, he wasn’tlovingher either. He didn’t love us at all, just saw her as a means to an end and me as a mistake.”
Kieran tenses beside me, his muscles tightening, expanding against the fabric of the black hoodie he has on. But he stays quiet, waiting. Giving me room.
I swallow a breath of air and press on, despite the ache in my bones begging me not to. Despite the distant warning from my mother, a woman who doesn’t deserve the space she rents in my brain.
Because even if Kieran Ivers is the Devil himself, I find myself wanting to burn right alongside him.
“Every day since his death, I’ve wrestled with the guilt that comes along with missing someone who never treated me right in the first place. Someone who doesn’t deserve my love, even in the afterlife.” Tears well in my eyes, and I glance up at him, unable to stop them from spilling over. They streak down my cheeks, and I hate the way his face softens, hate how he makes me break as much as I love the freedom that comes from fragmentation. “HehurtCaroline, neglected me, and was a piece of shit in general. What does that say about me for being sorry that he’s gone? Forstillwishing he’d been better?”
Kieran’s hands slip under my thighs, pulling me up and into his lap. His palm comes to the back of my head, cradling it carefully. I wallow in the silence, soaking his shirt, the tide inside me being pushed and pulled against the shore; it crashes in sudden spurts, waning outward with each breath I take, confusing me.
But the warmth in this man’s arms is constant. The only thing keeping me afloat, even as I sit and struggle with my feelings for him.
“What if the only people I’m capable of loving are the broken ones?”
“Then you love their shattered pieces and do your best not to get cut on the edges.” Pushing hair from my face, he swipes his thumbs over my cheeks, drying the skin and pressing a kiss to my forehead. It’s the gentlest he’s ever been, my breakdown seeming to shift something in him. Something between us. I can feel it, a cosmic imbalance in the universe working itself out through us.
He dips down, kissing me and stealing the doubt from my body; he lays me down on the ground, the heaviness of the conversation forgotten as things heat up between us, and he’s stripping me bare and mounting me before I get a chance to ask abouthisbroken pieces.
We don’t mention how what we’re doing is the ultimate desecration of this once holy place, or how it feels so fucking right to come together here, suddenly.
How right it feels to defy a spirituality that only brings us sadness, how his body inside of mine drives out all the evil harbored in my heart, a sponge extracting it and adding to his own.
Neither of us happens to notice the figure lurking in the shadows, watching. Waiting to siphon our happiness and destroy it.
Chapter 23
Kieran
The sound of bone crunching beneath the weight of your shoe isn’t something you ever really get used to. No matter how many dozens of hands you’ve crippled with the same tactic, the dull crack, sometimes clean and sometimes rattling, followed by the garbled scream of agony of the victim.
For a long time, it was the screams that kept me up at night, the look in a person’s eyes as the crunching morphed into breaking and kept going, sometimes pushing them to their utmost limits, because I knew they wouldn’t be around much longer, anyway. So what was the point in holding back?
This isn’t the life I asked for, but when you’re born into a world where violence bleeds from every corner, tainting the innocence you were supposed to keep a lot longer than you did, eventually you sink into your role. Accept the burden and the power that comes with it.
Two of Elia’s men grab the fragile-looking junkie and haul him up by his feet, securing his ankles to the hooks in the cement wall. Crimson’s basement looks exactly like a dungeon of unspeakable horrors, with a mix of Kal’s medieval tools and their various weapons of torture strewn about the damp, dark backdrop.
