Page 73 of Rage

She’d heard him talking to Max in the living room about a woman, someone in their world who’d been killed. Ruby didn’t know how the other woman was connected to Roman’s war with his father, but it seemed clear she was, and if something had happened to her, Ruby couldn’t see Roman out partying.

She turned her mind to the other possibility, the one she didn’t want to think too hard about: a woman.

Even thinking it was like touching an open wound, and she danced around the possibility in her mind, not wanting to picture too clearly the kind of woman Roman would visit in the middle of the night.

Although she would be sophisticated of course. Not naive and introverted like Ruby, but wise in the ways of the world, outgoing, bold.

She would be used to the toys in Roman’s secret room, used to the kind of sex Roman enjoyed.

A stab of jealousy tore through her and she rolled onto her side with a sigh.

Dammit.

She’d been in trouble even before Roman showed her the room he’d made for Olivia.

Now she was fucked.

Because what kind of man — what kind of dangerous, violent man — went to the trouble to create an exact replica of a little girl’s room so she would be at home in his apartment? The attention to detail was shocking. It was like walking into Olivia’s bedroom in the apartment they’d shared, right down to the unicorn and rainbow projector.

And the door had been locked in the weeks Ruby had been at the loft, which meant that Roman had done it all while Ruby had been held captive by her father.

So Roman — at war with his father and recovering from a gunshot wound — had still taken the time to make a bedroom for Ruby’s daughter, a daughter he’d spent exactly two days with before everything had gone to hell.

All of which pointed to an irrefutable fact: Roman wasn’t the man she’d imagined when Adam told her he was part of the Russian Mafia. He wasn’t the man Ruby had imagined when she’d been held prisoner in the grain terminal, trying to hate him, to forget the two nights she’d spent in his arms.

Worse, her feelings for him had grown in the weeks they’d been living together in the loft. It wasn’t just the sex — although the sex was admittedly mind-blowing.

It was him. He'd gotten under her skin, had made her rethink everything she thought she knew about herself. About what she wanted for herself and for Olivia.

She thought she heard the swoosh of the elevator and froze in her bed, listening.

He was home, his footsteps slower than usual as he made his way through the living area and down the hall.

He hesitated, like he was trying to decide whether to enter her room or his own.

A few seconds later, she heard him in his bathroom, banging around, making noise enough that she heard it even through the well-insulated walls of the loft.

She sat up in bed, some kind of internal alarm ringing a warning.

Something was wrong.

She threw her legs over the side of the bed and walked to the door in her T-shirt and underwear, then stepped into the hall.

She padded to his room and knocked softly on his door, but he either didn’t hear the knock or didn’t feel like answering because it was met with silence.

She turned the knob and opened the door a crack, peeking in to make sure she wasn’t interrupting something — she didn’t think he’d bring someone home but who knew? — then stepped inside when she saw that the bedroom was empty.

The bathroom door was open, a column of light cast against the floor in the bedroom, dark except for the glimmer of the city shining through the room’s large window.

“Roman?” She walked toward the bathroom. “Are you okay?”

She heard a grunt and stepped into the bathroom. “Oh my god…”

He was sitting on the toilet wearing nothing but jeans, blood dripping from his face onto his chest, bruises rising around his eyes and over his cheekbones. His nose was crooked (broken again?) and his chest had been raked as if by a feral cat, the blood already drying on his inked skin.

She crossed the distance between them. “What happened to you?”

“Fight,” he said, trying to tear a piece of surgical tape off the roll with his teeth.

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