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Fuck. Why did I run into the Devil’s Preserve?
It’s cold. Now that I’ve stopped running, the December chill nips at my legs and arms and racks my bones with a shiver. I step toward the direction I think I came from and my foot catches on a root, rolling my ankle underneath me.
“Fuck,” I hiss out into the darkness. As I bend down to rub it, the silence is broken by something that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.
The crack of a twig underfoot.
Raphael’s presence crawls up my spine before he even utters a word. Before he grips my waist and shoves me against a tree.
He takes a step forward, blocking me in. “Did you burn down Martin O’Hare’s casino, Penelope?”
My heartbeat flickers like a flame; part of me is grateful for his warmth, and the other part of me knows it’ll be the last time I’ll feel it.
I don’t want to tell him the truth, and not just because I’m scared of the look in his eye. He already knows too much; I cracked like a fucking egg on the swim platform today, my childhood trauma running out of me like yolk. It feels like every piece of myself I give to him is another piece I can’t get back. A piece I can’t hide behind. What am I going to do: stand here, raw and vulnerable and fucking soppy in front of a man? A man I don’t even like? Who doesn’t like me?
My answer doesn’t come quick enough, because his hand shoots out and wraps around my throat, shoving me backward until my shoulders scrape the rough bark behind me. I bite down a hiss and clench my frozen fists at my side.
“Going to need an answer, Penelope,” he says, sounding bored.
The broad planes of his silhouette blur into the darkness behind him, making him appear larger—scarier. I shouldn’t be alone with a man like him, and the black void that exists behind his irises tells me he agrees.
With an impatient breath, his thumb presses harder against my pulse. “Did you set fire to his casino?” The very real possibility of dying flashes behind my eyelids and forces me to nod.
His stomach tenses against mine. “Why?”
Here I go, cracking like that egg again. Flexing my throat in his tight grip, I tell him.
“When a new casino opened in town, I had no idea it was run by the fucking Irish mob,” I croak. “I didn’t even know who Martin O’Hare was; all I was thinking about were all the fresh marks. Well, one night, he caught me…”
My words trail off. “Swindling,” Raphael finishes for me, gaze flashing black.
Card counting, actually. But I have a feeling telling Vegas’s most prolific casino owner that I card count, while alone in the woods with him, would be a very stupid idea. Instead, I nod. “He told me to leave town and never come back.”
His gaze narrows. “But why the fire? Why didn’t you just leave?”
We stare at each other. “Because when Martin O’Hare cornered me in the alleyway outside the casino, he did the same thing as you’re doing to me right now.”
When O’Hare had his hands around my throat, it had reminded me of being ten, standing in the alley of another casino, with another man with a strong grip. Although it didn’t have the same horrific ending, I was bitter. So bitter, I made the impulsive decision to light a vodka bottle outside his casino as I waited for the bus out of town on the other side of the road.
Three stuttered heartbeats pass. In that time, confusion sweeps like a shadow across Raphael’s expression, then his gaze drops to his hand around my throat.
It slips down to my collarbone, and balls into a fist by his side.
“You’re a dead girl walking, Penelope,”
I let out a shaky breath, a whisper of defiance rolling through me. Not because I believe I’m lucky enough to evade death twice in one lifetime—hell, I’m not sure if I’m lucky at all anymore—but because the image of my father curling up into a fetal position before he was killed has been burned into my retinas for the last seven years.
What an embarrassing way to go. Ever since, I made a vow that when death found me, I’d greet it with a straight spine and a staring match.
I tilt my chin up. “I don’t want to play a game tonight. If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”
My teeth chatter. Branches whip in the wind above our heads. Eventually, Raphael runs a thumb over his lip and drags his gaze to the blackened sky.
“Now, where would be the fun in that?”
What?
Before I can reply, he stoops and wraps an arm around my waist. My feet leave the ground as he hurls me over his shoulder. Blood rushes to my head and my thighs tingle in perverse expectation under the heat of his palm just below the curve of my ass. I couldn’t have run very far, because less than a minute passes before the moonlight cuts across the muddy ground and the car is in sight.
