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His gaze slides up and down my body. Not in a leering way. In an assessing way.
Ice spreads through my veins, because I know what he sees. What I have been hiding underneath my clothes. Not only the scars and burn marks, which are proof that I have been in a lot of fights and have been trained to withstand torture, but also the fact that I am incredibly fit.
It’s one thing to pretend to be mediocre at everything here when I’m wearing clothes. But naked, there is no hiding that my sleek legs and arms, and everything about me, is made up of lean muscles.
Fuck, I need to try to salvage this somehow.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt out, using my very real shock to make my words believable. While covering my private parts with my arms, I lean to the side and try to glance around him towards the changing room beyond, but he’s blocking the entire doorway. “Where is everyone else?”
“Gone,” he replies.
I take a few steps forward. Rico remains where he is, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. My gaze flits towards the small metal hooks set into the wall next to him, where we hang our towels while showering. Mine is now missing, which means that the rack is now completely empty.
Rico runs his eyes over my body again, and then jerks his chin at me. “Where did you get those?”
I don’t need to look down to know what he means. The scars. The burn marks.
“Abusive father,” I reply. It’s true enough.
He is silent for a while, holding my gaze as if trying to read any lies in my eyes. But since it is more or less the truth, or a version of it anyway, he doesn’t find any. When he realizes that it’s true, a spark of fury lights in his eyes.
“If you give me a name and an address, I can have him dead within the week.”
Another wave of genuine surprise pulses through me. He offered to kill someone for me. And that fury in his eyes… He is angry that someone hurt me. Strange emotions twist through my chest at the realization. No one has ever been upset that someone hurt me before.
A small and pathetic part of me wants to tell him. Tell him exactly where he can find the Hands of Peace and then let him and the rest of the Morelli family deal with my problem for me.
But the world doesn’t work like that. If I tell Rico who I am, hemightlet me live. But the patriarch Federico Morelli himself? Not a fucking chance. I know exactly what he does to his enemies, and since I was a part of the group who murdered Federico’s only child, I am the Morelli family’s enemy number one. If Federico learns who I am, all I will get is a very agonizing death.
“I appreciate the offer,” I say, surprising myself when I realize that I actually mean it too. “But that’s a score I need to settle on my own.”
Rico sucks his teeth, but then nods in acknowledgement.
With my arms still covering as much of my body as I can, I move closer to the doorway. Rico remains firmly in the way.
“Can you please move?” I ask. “I need to get changed before lunch ends.”
He says nothing. Only continues watching me. I once again try to glance around him, hoping against hope that someone else will come in and tell him to get the hell out of the women’s changing room. But I know that it’s useless. Even if someone were to come in, they would never dare to kick Rico out.
I edge another step forward. “Please move.”
“Make me.”
It takes great effort not to visibly grind my teeth. Instead, I summon my dwindling reserves of patience and give him a pleading look. “Please, I—”
He moves like a fucking viper.
Just like that first strike in the sparring room, my instincts are screaming at me to move, to block, and to hit back. This time, however, I manage to smother them and instead just jerk back as if in panic when Rico comes for me.
Within the span of a few seconds, I end up on my back on the cold shower room floor. The suppressed instincts might be fake, but the huff as I hit the floor is real since I don’t try to catch myself.
Before I can roll over, Rico steps up beside me and puts his boot on my throat. He pushes down slightly, putting pressure on my windpipe and pinning me to the floor.
His eyes are hard as he locks them on me. “Fight back.”
I wiggle on the cold wet floor and weakly try to push his boot off my throat while croaking out, “Please, I—”
“Fight back. I know you can.”
