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When it was her and I, we forgot about Bianco and the heaviness of impending doom weighing on our shoulders. We’d watch our favorite films on repeat and cook together. Fuck, I read to her and I loved it.
I watch her shoulders relax and her breathing slow down. Her fingers pick at the box of contacts, and she takes a long breath.
“Will you really do it?” she rasps.
When I don’t reply, keeping my words to myself as the best protection for my feelings, she insists. “Kill me?”
Her deep indigo eyes bore into my black ones, and I can hardly believe what I’m seeing in them.
I expected the fear; she knows I’m a killer. I never thought there’d be so much sadness, distress…desolation. As if she can’t take the betrayal, as if our friendship and our love had meant everything to her.
She thought I had betrayed her, so she stabbed me in the chest. And for whom? The man who had taken her away from her free life. Viktor Volkov turned Rose against me, and she blindly believed him. She betrayed me for him, and I can never forget that.
I bring my palm to her cheek, caressing her face just to indulge in something forbidden.
“Go to bed,” I order low, taking all emotions away from my voice.
Her gaze drops with disappointment, shutting down any hope she had of me opening up to her tonight.
She goes to my old bed—the one I shared with Lik for over a year—brings the covers to her chest and takes her turtleneck off from under them. My eyes get stuck to her naked shoulders, her defined collarbone, and the new tattoo she has there. Roses surround a snake as it makes its way through her shoulder, her collarbone, and the bottom of her neck. Only one rose is a deep red. The rest is colorless, and the snake seems to be making its way tothatrose. Her arms sport dozens of other much smaller tattoos. She’s added to our collection over time.
It hurts. Something more painful than a bullet through the flesh. It burns from the inside, and it ignites my heart with agony. I feel it throbbing down my veins, poisoning my blood with a possessive need to own this woman for myself. She must have done them withhim.
Until she got taken away from me, I had done every single one of Rose’s tattoos myself. Bar the only one she didn’t want, the sign of the Bianco family she has on her wrist, that X that brands her as theirs. I even taught her how to tattoo, and she did some of mine. And now…she dares to show up with dozens more, with a huge one when she used to only want small designs.
You’re getting hung up on details. Leave it. Just leave it.
I see it in her eyes, that she achieved what she wanted when she took her top off. So I don’t say anything. I grit my teeth and keep it all to myself.
Silence is your ally, Sam.
I shut down my dad’s voice, shut the light, and I’m about to shut the door when her voice reaches me.
“I genuinely believed it, you know.” She doesn’t give me time to ask what. She knows I won’t. “That you weren’t going to be part of the people who use me.” I hear her shift under the covers. “Look at you now.”
My breath stalls, my heart breaks, and my stomach tightens.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll be dead soon.”
I shut the door, or I think I do. Because when I finally let out the breath I was holding and look back, I seem to have left it slightly ajar, like my body simply refuses to hurt her because my subconscious knows she would have a panic attack if I had shut the door completely.
I find it too difficult to cause her harm, and telling her I’ll kill her as soon as I find the Volkov brothers is starting to feel more and more like a lie.
27
SAM
counting crimes– Nessa Barrett
When Lik and I walk into the apartment the next evening, my eyes widen with surprise. Rose is watching TV on the sofa, eating her favorite Vietnamese takeaway.
“Is that Brooklyn Nine-Nine?” Lik asks excitedly.
It’s as if he completely forgot yesterday, and there is no better way to describe his personality. Someone tried to kill him less than twenty-four hours ago, but he’s now ready to bond over Brooklyn Nine-Nine with her.
He bloody loves this show, and it plays on repeat at home. It’s what I put on for him after I tie him up and fuck him until he’s crying. If his aftercare doesn’t include a blanket, soda, cuddles, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I can kiss goodbye to dominating him.
Rose is eating, and that in and of itself is a rare occurrence. She is eating something other than cereal, which is also a shocker. But she’shere. She listened, she didn’t go anywhere, and the fact that she ordered in confirms that. That and the smell of cigarettes permeating the flat. She hasn’t opened any windows or gone onto the terrace to smoke—her small gesture of rebellion.
