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“Delilah,” Brandy repeated, testing out her name. “Can we get you a cup of tea? Maybe call someone for you?”
“No.” She slowly turned her head toward Brandy, and a shiver went down my spine because it was some shit straight out of a horror movie. “There is no one to call.” She blinked rapidly and then suddenly shouted, “They killed the only person I had left!”
Her whole body vibrated with the force of her words, her hands balled into tight fists in her lap, and her chest heaved. This was an emotion I understood, an emotion I could get behind, and one that fed mine like a shot of adrenaline to the veins.
I leaned forward, sucking air through my teeth, too tired to hide the pain that racked my battered body. “Then whatdo you say we take those fuckers down? First, we take their money, and then we take their lives.”
The room spun, and darkness crowded the edges of my vision. Exhaustion pulled at me, and my elbow slipped off my leg. As I felt myself slide off the couch, I heard Delilah say, “I’m with you until the end.”
A smile curled my lips as I let the blackness have its way with me.
His face rose above me like a specter, a cruel sneer contorting his face, but no matter how hard I struggled against my bonds it didn’t change anything. There was no happy ending to this tale, only pain and blood. It was always the same. Still, I couldn’t help but fight. It was who I was, bred into me like stubbornness or pride.
So, I fought with everything I had. The sound of crunching bone was satisfying until I felt something wet dripping on my face. Oh, god, his blood was on my face. With renewed effort, I tried to bat him away while swiping at my face with my hand. I had to get it off. I couldn’t let it stain my skin.
Terror seized my chest, and my eyes popped open, my lips parting. Only the scream never left me because consciousness took over, and I found myself in a brightly lit room, pinned down by the last man I expected to see.
My body shuddered, and I quit struggling. There was something dripping on me, but it wasn’t blood.
Switch’s face was directly above mine, water dripping onto me from his hair and beard. His eyes, the cinnamon eyes I loved so much, had missed so much, bore into mine.
“Stel,” rumbled from his chest, half tortured whisper, half prayer.
He shifted his weight to one side, releasing his hold on my wrist to stroke the side of my face. His touch was feather light and something inside me cracked even more. I didn’t want him touching me like I was fragile, like I was somehow broken.
“Don’t,” I croaked.
His hand paused over my face. “Don’t what?”
“Touch me like that.”
He shrank back as if I’d hit him, his hand falling to the bed beside me. “I’m sorry, I heard you, and I…”
“You what,” I spit back. “Thought you’d come in here like nothing ever happened and save poor little broken Stella. That I’d be grateful and fall to my knees in worship? Well, you can just crawl back into whatever hole you came out of because it was only a nightmare. I’m doing just fine, so feel free to leave anytime.”
His eyes flashed, but before I could decide what emotion lay in their depths, it was gone. “No.”
“What the fuck do you mean no?”
“No. To all of it. I’m not leaving. The next time you get pissed and tell me to fuck off, the farthest I’m going is into the next room, and that’s only ’cause I value my nuts. Wherever you are is where I belong, even if that means I have to put up with Hunter twenty-four seven.”
The stubborn set of his jaw had me cursing the hope that flared unbidden in my chest, and I had to remind myself that his promises didn’t mean shit. They were just words. Men made promises all the time that they had no intention of keeping, and Switch was a man like any other. He’d already let me down once and I wasn’t stupid enough to give him the chance to do it again.
He cupped my chin in his large hand, his breath fanning my face, almost as if he wanted me to not only hear his words but to feel them ghosting across my skin.“Stel, you are a wild thing, not some flower to be crushed and forgotten. They can put you in a cage, try to break you, but wild things always find a way to escape. And when you’ve broken the last of your chains, we’ll make them pay. Together.”
Switch looked down at me expectantly, wetness soaking through the sheet, the heat of his body reaching me through the blanket that separated us. My body softened against his harder one, melting against him without fear, my nipples pebbling against the T-shirt I wore, and a familiar ache gathering deep in my core.
It felt…wrong. In so many different ways. It was too much, too soon, and a part of me hated him for reminding me of how my body had always reacted to him. He brought to the surface something I thought for sure I’d never feel again. Lust.
This was a disaster on so many levels. A fuck storm of epic proportions that I had to shut down in a hurry. My heart was too fragile to handle the rejection that would surely follow.
So, I did the only sensible thing I could and put as much sting into the words as I could muster. “Talk is cheap, Switch, and like I said before, I’m fine. So, you, and the large dick you have plastered to my thigh, can go bother someone else.”
The fucker actually had the nerve to smile, and while he looked like shit, comparatively speaking, that lopsided grin of his still got to me. And that was something I simply couldn’t allow. There was only enough room for vengeance now in what was left of my tattered heart.
“And, as I said before, my large dick and I aren’t going anywhere. Whenever you’re ready to hunt these fuckers down, or if you find yourself with a sudden itch you need scratched, you know where to find us.”
CHAPTER 19
