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I don’t even realize Riley left the chair and joined me on the rug until her fingertips brush my arm, so lightly that the touch is barely there. A butterfly kiss.
My eyes snap up to meet hers, and I’m perfectly aware how my gaze typically affects people, but she doesn’t jump back.
If my pale eyes are as colorless as chips of ice, her warm brown ones are the opposite.
“No. I haven’t always been like this,” I find myself answering without meaning to.
She nods like I said more than that, and for a moment I’m overcome with the oddest feeling that I did. That I told her more than I meant to, or else that she simply understood what I didn’t have to say, the way Maddoc and Dante—onlyMaddoc and Dante—often do.
“I’m sorry I came in here uninvited,” she says after a moment, her fingers still hovering just above my arm. “I didn’t know it would matter so much to you.”
I blink. I’m not used to apologies. Neither to giving them nor to receiving them.
“I’m also sorry,” I say stiffly. “For what I did about it. After. I don’t… always have control.”
How could I? I’m the child of a monster, and my mother passed that heritage on to me. Order helps. Routine helps. I may have ways to keep it on a leash and—usually—stop it from doing anything awful, but the monster is still there and always will be.
It’s a part of me, all the same.
A part that, just by thinking about it like this, has it trying to rise up and break free.
But then Riley pulls her fingers away from my arm and rubs one over her chest, directly between the slight swell of her breasts, and the monster loses its hold on me, my attention suddenly riveted to the spot.
It’s where I marked her.
My breath quickens, and I don’t even realize I’ve moved too, until I find my fingers lying over hers.
They tremble. Hers, I think, or maybe mine. Maybe both.
“You cut me,” she whispers, not pushing me away.
Heat races through me, swift and overwhelming, and I drag my fingers over the spot. I can’t look away. I want her shirt gone so I cansee. “Did it leave a scar?”
“Yes,” she says, a shudder going through her body when I stroke the spot again. Her nipples pebble under her shirt. Then her chin lifts. “And you seemed to have perfect control the night you gave it to me. That wasn’t an accident.”
She’s not wrong about that, but she is wrong about me havingperfectcontrol. If I’d had that, I never would have gone to her room that night.
But I did have some control. Enough to keep the monster in check. Not enough to keep it from taking over, but enough that I was able to refocus my rage and confusion over the way she affected me—the way she still affects me—into the clean, precise, methodical action of cutting up her clothes.
I systematically shredded each item she brought into our home, and then, when that wasn’t enough, I climbed on top of her and cut the ones she was wearing off her while she slept. All without marking her skin.
And that still wasn’t enough.
“Youwantedto cut me,” Riley whispers, her voice trembling as she captures my fingers and holds them still.
I can feel her heart beating under my fingertips, and the heat of her body sends a sizzling awareness all the way down to my cock. It starts to thicken and fill, but shame fills me too.
She’s right. I cut her on purpose that night. I did have enough control.
I did it because I wanted to.
“I’m… sorry,” I repeat, blood rushing in my ears as my body sways toward her, the memory both repelling me and drawing me closer with a magnetic pull.
Riley’s breath hitches, her pupils blowing wide, and heat spills down my spine at the way she subtly tips her head back and looks up at me.
Not glaring. Not accusing. It looks like an invitation, and I freeze. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never let myself get close to a woman like this. Not physically, and not any other way, either.
I’ve never admitted the kinds of truths I’ve just shared with her to anyone.
