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Carol shakes her head. “She died a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says, patting me on the shoulder and walking. “She lived a good life. We all have. Thanks to Alistair.”
Reese
Unlike Van, Carol was a delight the entire evening. I hated to leave. Freedom House was warm and welcoming—a distinct difference from the castle-like mansion where we’ve returned.
“I thought I might find you down here.” His dark gaze lifts over the top of the computer screen.
“And I thought I promised consequences if you returned to this room.”
How cute. He’s pretending to be the villain after showing me his secret lair of women and children with special needs that he funds with all those billions of dollars he inherited.
“You know, Alistair”—I use his real name for the simple fact that he showed me the real man behind the flames—“I’m starting to think your threats are merely harmless flirtations.”
Even in the dim light, I see his jaw flex, but I’m not like everyone else who retreats at his punishing stare. I move toward it, enchanted by the haunted boy buried beneath.
“I think you want me to break this burden of a façade you carry.”
My steps are calculated as I stalk toward my violent husband—the man who rests only when justice is served.
“I think Van Gogh is tired of being merciful while Alistair Cain barters his justice away.”
He chuckles darkly. “You have it all wrong, sweetheart. Alistair Cain has always been the warden of Van Gogh’s dark cell. After all, he is the reckoning you pleaded for when you left Van Gogh to burn.” He’s lying.
“Shall we make a wager on it, then?” Using the tip of my index finger, I tilt his chin so he looks into my eyes.
“What did you have in mind?”
I don’t miss the way his eyes light up. Dropping his chin, I move my hands to his knees. “If you admit you’re a good man,” I offer, parting his legs and easing my body between them, “then I’ll allow you to add two years to my sentence.” My knees touch the cool floor.
“And if I don’t?” he challenges.
I offer him a polite shrug. “Then…”
His eyes flare with a punishing desire as my hands slide up his thighs. “You’ll shave two years off my sentence.”
A vigilante arsonist who is known for his extreme reactions looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have, but if that’s the case, I’d argue I lost my mind the second I locked eyes with him many years ago. I knew there was so much more to this man—okay, fine. I didn’t think that initially. At the time, all I knew was that he was hotter than indigestion after a fireball. But after that thought, I knew he was much more, even if that more was a common criminal.
Either way, I had to know who I was falling for.
“No.” Van’s deeply annoyed baritone pulls my attention back to the unsettled deal between us.
“The only way you will leave this marriage early is by God’s will. So, unless you’re praying for your heart to stop, it will beat at my side until I shatter it between my cold, dead hands.”
Now he’s just showing off.
“You could have just said you loved me. You didn’t have to woo me with those sweet promises.”
I was a sure thing after seeing the community he built and protected. But this hateful I love you is more romantic than that time he was too embarrassed to propose and chose to blackmail me instead.
Van’s mouth twitches at the corner, seeming to consider smiling before he locks it down into one of his trademark looks of boredom.
“Do you need time to regroup and reconsider another plea deal?”
He thinks he’s freaking cute with these negotiation tactics, but the thing is, I’m not like the defense attorneys he’s used to dealing with. Like him, I’m a criminal—and we’ve never played by the rules.
