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‘What are you doing?’ he asked her as he closed the door behind him. He expected her to try and hide the glass, or run from him, or attack him. He expected something. What he didn’t expect was for her to continue what she was doing, dragging the sharp glass down her arm as if he wasn’t there, as she muttered and shook and wept.
‘Hey!’ he said, a little louder this time. He crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed hold of the hand that held the offending weapon, squeezing hard until she was forced to drop it. The glass fell to the ground, breaking into two bloodied, uneven shards.
‘Seven years bad luck,’ he said flippantly, looking from the glass to her glazed eyes. He felt relief when she glared at him, the daze seemingly broken.
‘Are you kidding me?’ she growled. ‘I think I’ve got a lifetime of bad luck ahead of me, don’t you?’
He kicked the glass away and sat beside her on the bed, close enough that his jeans brushed her blood-smeared thigh. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, genuinely curious.
She shot him a look so scathing, it made him want to shrink back — only, he was Dornan fucking Ross, and he shrank back from nobody, not even his own father.
‘I know you were watching me,’ she replied, and it made him smile.
‘I like watching you,’ he said, shocked by his own honesty. ‘Does that bother you?’
She continued to stare boldly at him. ‘Your father’s men killed my boyfriend last night,’ she said, making a choking noise at the back of her throat.
There it was. Her anguish. Her struggle. Her why.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, noticing how the blood was still pouring from her wrist. She’d cut deeper than he’d first thought. ‘May I?’ he gestured towards her wrist and she shrugged, which he took as an invitation. He gathered his grip around the underside of her wrist and cradled it up to the light, gently inspecting the cut.
‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’ he asked, probing at the wound with his fingers to determine its depth, all the while biting down on the tip of his tongue to stop it from darting out and licking up her blood.
‘Of course not,’ she retorted, pulling her hand away. But Dornan didn’t release his grip on her, and they stared each other down in a silent battle of eyes and wills.
‘Don’t you ever want to hurt yourself because you can’t hurt the person who fucked everything up?’
Her words were frank and revealing, making him ponder them. Every time he smashed his own fists into a boxing bag, or a whore, or another Gypsy Brother, he relished the pain, and welcomed the relief that spilling his own blood offered.
‘Let me guess,’ Dornan said, rubbing his thumb along her cut as she watched in silence. ‘My father?’
She snapped her gaze back to him, a sadness bursting forth from her that made him drop her wrist and stand up, lest that sadness infect him in some way.
‘Yes,’ she said brokenly. ‘Your father. And mine.’
He didn’t take his eyes from her until he remembered the blood, and looked down to see it coating his palms.
‘You like blood, don’t you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Other people would recoil at the sight of it, but not you. You wear it like an old outfit. It suits you.’
Anyone else would have been embarrassed to admit it, but not Dornan. He traded in lives and in blood, so why shouldn’t he like it? And in this case, she had spilled it of her own volition, which made him all the more excited.
‘I like your blood,’ he replied, smiling wolfishly. ‘I like it very much.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARIANA
To say I was embarrassed would be an understatement.
I was mortified.
When Dornan didn’t come back, I’d assumed I was on my own for the night. And, truth be told, I was terrified. I eyed the bed at first, thinking that I could maybe get a little sleep, but the thought of being woken with a knife at my neck or a gun in my mouth made me determined to stay awake.
So I paced. I always paced when I was nervous, or impatient. This time, however, I was pacing almost entirely to keep myself from passing out and waking up to an even worse situation.
My stomach cramped into a twisted, painful knot, and for some reason it made me think of Luis.
I will never see him again.
