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“Mr. Shaw, I understand your distress, but from what I’ve gathered, you’re not next of kin to Ms. Leblanc and, therefore, shouldn’t be present during any medical examinations.”
“I’ve decided that Iwillbe here. Now, do your job or I’ll get you blacklisted from the city.”
The threat was enough to propel him to action, which in turn made me burn hotter than the room’s temperature. And while he confirmed the absence of serious injuries, I was still two seconds away from bashing his head against the nearest object and cutting off the gloved fingers he clinically examined her with.
There’s no rhyme or reason to the raging possessiveness I feel toward this woman. A possessiveness that up to now, I’ve only held toward the wellbeing of my legacy, Gwen, and the need for Susan’s inevitable destruction.
And the worst part? This feeling is completely different from all of the above, irrevocably illogical, and it burns like acid.
Dr. Werner left after I opted to dress her wounds myself and kicked him out. If he’d touched her one more time, he’d be floating in the pool as we speak. Besides, I’ve been constantly getting cut, bruised, and bloodied in one way or another since I was a teenager, so the task wasn’t foreign.
I put ointment on Aspen’s skin, covering the galaxy of bruises on her face and shoulder and a slight red mark on her upper chest. Not to mention the black eye that was the size of City Hall and just as grim.
That was ten hours ago.
Ten hours of pacing, then watching surveillance camera footage of her movements after I called in favors with detectives to track her from when she left her apartment.
I didn’t miss that Mateo entered her building minutes before she went out dressed in casual clothes. Then she went into a boutique and came out empty-handed but with a girlish smile. The assault happened after she wandered into a non-surveilled alley, because five minutes later, she limped out, hugging a wall, and sporting a map of bruises.
The only suspicious thing I noticed was a black van with tinted windows that was caught by a ring door camera near that location. It kept away from the surveillance cameras like a pro, so it captured no license plate and definitely no faces.
It could have been Mateo’s men, for all I know, but I already made sure they were still acting as their boss’s watchdogs during the time that she was being beaten.
My gaze fixates on her form—sleeping, her brows knit, her skin marked in a grotesque way.
I know how her fair flesh looks when bitten, sucked on, and pleasurably sated. I remember putting all those marks and more on her twenty-one years ago and leaving a path with my teeth, tongue, and lips.
And although she kept that damn mask on, I recall the feeling, the possessiveness, and the illogical urge to do it all over again.
But that image and this one are as opposite as day and night. While Dr. Werner assured me the injuries are superficial and will heal, it still sits fucking wrong with me.
From the part of her being followed, to how she was beaten, and eventually, to how she ended up here.
That last tidbit fills me with an emotion that I vehemently refuse to put a name to.
A moan rips from her lips and it resembles a dying person’s last plea for mercy.
This woman is stronger than the universe and its aliens, a fact that has always infuriated me yet fascinated me in equal measure, so to see her battered is weird.
Forget weird.
It’s rage-inducing in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
She shifts in her sleep, blinks her non-swollen eye once…twice, and then she springs up into a sitting position, immediately staring down at her flimsy cotton dress.
I threw away the sweater—it was dirty, bloody and had a hole the shape of my fist in it.
The dress is bloody, too, but the chances of removing it and remaining sane were below zero. So I left it intact.
“Kingsley,” she whispers, then winces, probably due to the double size of her lips and the cut.
“Morning, sunshine,” I say with no warmth whatsoever, flipping my Zippo open. “Now that you’re out of your Sleeping Beauty phase, mind telling me what, and I can’t stress this enough, thefuckhappened?”
“I…” She blinks the mucus that’s gathered in her eyes, despite my attention to cleaning the shit out of those fuckers, then inspects her surroundings. “Wait…where am I?”
“In my house, previously known as Black Valley Manor before I sued the state to have the liberty of stripping the pretentious name and won, obviously. You showed up here with bruises the size of Texas, remember?”
She opens her swollen lips, closes them, and opens them again in a poor imitation of a goldfish. “I…didn’t mean to come here.”
