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Her eyes widened, her mouth dropping open slightly.
”As long as you’re with me, I will never let anyone hurt you,” I told her. ”I know you’re scared of me. You should be. But I will fucking destroy anyone that tries to come near you.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. ”But why?”
Because I’d hated seeing her like I’d found her and I wanted to make sure she was protected. Because the moment someone had brought her into our lives by plopping her in a chair, tying her up and leaving her to die in the club we owned together, they had made her our problem, and I didn’t appreciate it.
Because she was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.
Because I wanted to get to know her more than I wanted most things.
Because the idea of anyone hurting her again made my blood boil, my temple pulse, my body fill with rage.
”Because,” I said after a second. ”It would be messy. I don’t like mess.”
I removed my hand from her chin and she nodded as she looked at the half-open apartment door. ”Okay,” she said. ”I guess that makes sense.”
I pushed open the door and my breath caught in my throat as I looked at the mess. The person who’d assaulted her hadn’t been careful. The scent of stale chinese food filled my nostrils until I found it, next to a shattered plate, on the carpet near a tiny circular dining room table. Her laptop had fallen to the floor, still half-open and knocked on its side. The water bottle she’d been drinking remained untouched on the desk.
The chair she’d been sitting on was tilted and on its back against the sofa. There were no sounds except for the quiet chirping of birds outside, punctuated by some traffic noise every now and then.
I straightened the chair, put her laptop back on the table and unplugged it, closing it as I did, and made sure that things looked generally tidier than they had when she’d been taken from her apartment.
I could see her standing by the door from the corner of my eye. ”You can come in now, Sofia,” I said. ”I’m going to need a vacuum cleaner to get the food, but…”
She did as I told her, approaching me silently. She dropped to her knees in front of the food instead and sighed as she started to pick at it with her hands, her eyes welling with tears.
I kneeled in front of her, taking her hands in mine.
”Hey,” I said. ”You go get a bag of clothes for the week. Anything you need. I’ve got this.”
Her lower lip trembled as her eyes welled with tears. She was trying to stop herself from crying again, but this time, she wasn’t successful. When she closed her eyes, a fat tear slid down her cheek.
She shook her head, her hands still in mine. ”I just don’t get it,” she said. ”I hadn’t gotten…I didn’t even have information…I just…”
I shouldn’t have done it. I knew I shouldn’t do it even as I looked at her, but I couldn’t help myself. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around her. For a second, I expected her to squirm away, to tell me to fuck off, to scream that I shouldn’t have touched her.
She didn’t do any of those things.
She leaned into my touch instead, sighing heavily. Her head rested on my shoulder and I felt tears on my shirt–then her shoulders shuddered.
She was sobbing.
”It’ll be okay,” I said. ”I promise.”
She laughed between tears, pulling away from me as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ”You don’t know that.”
”I do,” I said.
I did know that. I knew that whoever had made this woman cry, I was going to kill them.
And I was going to make them suffer.
Chapter Thirteen: Sofia
Okay,somyfirstthought probably shouldn’t have been how nice the gangster who had kidnapped me smelled.
He smelled so good, though. And he gave great hugs, to the point where I could almost forget that I was his captive–though, I had to now admit to myself, that wasn’t entirely against my will.
