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“I won’t bleedmyown pride like a pig over the altar ofyours.”
Her smirk widens. “What pride?”
There’s a sinking feeling inside my chest, and the pain, all of a sudden, is gone. My shoulders slump, and I let go of Willow’s arms, and I step back when she steps into me. I let her push me back and shove me into my chair, and I let her stand over me with all the cruelty of her crushing down on me.
“Say it,” she commands.
And I obey.
“I love you, Willow Lynch, I love you and I fuckinghateit. You’ve managed to turn my entire body into a playground for your pleasure, my every thought into a shrine dedicated to your chaos. I can’t tell if loving you is a sickness or just a manifestation of my own self-destruction, but it’s something I’ll never be free from. Loving you is a punishment, it’s the hell in which I’ll suffer for eternity.”
If she is moved by my words, she doesn’t show it. She rakes her fingers through my hair, grabbing it in a harsh fistful, forcing my head back as she stoops over me.
“Stop fooling yourself. You’re not capable of love.”
“What is it then? Another symptom of my shitty fucking heart?”
“It’s acrush, Luca.” She lets go of me, throws me a disdainful look. “It’ll pass.”
I shake my head.
“You’rethe one fooling yourself, Lynch. You know exactly what this thing is between us. You were meant for me, just like I was meant for you. Nothing else in the world will feel the way this feels. Not revenge, not all the money or power in the world, nobody else and nothing else. You and I are drinking from the same poison, the only difference is that I’ve swallowed it willingly and you are stillchoking.”
She steps back. “I don’t love you.”
I stand, I follow her. I wrap her in my arms, pressing her to my fucked-up heart. I speak against her mouth. “Liar.”
“I’ll prove it to you,” she grits out, the warmth of her breath mingling with mine.
“Yes. Yes, Lynch. Prove it to me.”
And I take her to my room, where she proves nothing at all, where I fuck her slow and tender in my bed, where I touchevery one of her bruises and lovebite with my mouth, where I tell her I love her over and over again until she’s begging me to shut up and writhing in my arms and coming on my cock, again. She falls asleep in my arms where she belongs, against my heart where she rules like a fucking tyrant. And as she falls asleep, she breathes, “You don’t deserve my love.”
And I breathe back. “I’ll earn it.”
“No, you won’t,” she sighs, but I don’t remember if she said that or if I just dreamt it.
49
Deathblow
Luca
I wake up aloneto a dark room, disoriented, dehydrated, skull pounding like a hammer is slamming from side to side inside it.
“What the fuck.”
My mouth and throat are so dry my voice comes out a croak. I haul myself upright and reach for the lamp. The light sends a stabbing pain through my head. I feel around for my phone. It’s turned off. I check my watch—it tells me it’s six. By the look of the dark October sky outside, it could be six in the morning or six in the afternoon.
I don’t need to look around to know Willow isn’t here. Her existence is engraved so deeply into me that her absence echoes louder than her presence. I throw aside my bedcovers and force myself up, sitting on the edge of the bed as I turn my phone on.
The screen lights up, and then the notifications begin flooding in. Alerts, emails, texts, missed calls. Hundreds of them. Unknown numbers, calls from my staff, Marcus, Nadine, Woodrow. Dozens upon dozens of missed calls from my parents.
“Fuck.”
Phone in hand, I stumble into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I need to wake the fuck up. The lingering grogginess and insistent headache tell me that I wasn’t just asleep—I was drugged. I check my neck and find the telltale red prick where I was injected with a needle.
“Lynch.”
