A Thousand Cuts (Underworld Kings)

But we weren’t strangers. Not exactly.

I wasn’t a stranger to him. Not after everything I’d told him last night. Everything I’d given him.

He was still a stranger to me. He hadn’t offered any of his own demons. I hadn’t demanded them either. Something about this power imbalance appealed to me. Beyond that, I suspected if I knew anything more about this man, I wouldn’t be able to leave.

My blood heated as the reality of everything I’d let happen, everything I’d exposed, settled on my shoulders. “No, you won’t,” I whispered, my voice weak, even to my own ears.

He didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. The knowing smirk told me everything. I wanted to hate him for the smirk. For the power he had over me. For everything he knew about me now. There was ownership in those eyes. I wanted to hate that too.

But I didn’t. Didn’t argue or say anything. I pulled myself out of his grip and got in the car.

I didn’t look back as we drove off, but I knew he watched me.

Instead of focusing on that, I put my attention on the driver, who had yet to speak.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The irony was not lost on me that I was asking the name of the person who’d heard and seen me have sex and not the man I had sex with.

“Felix.”

Espresso eyes met mine in the mirror. Something moved inside of me. Something that should’ve been fully sated after last night. This morning.

But this was a different kind of hunger. I saw the coldness in those eyes. They were devoid of something. The man I spent the night with had a coldness to him—that was part of what drew me to him—but there was a heat too, a spark.

There was no spark here, no humanity. It scared me. Yet it also excited me.

“Felix,” I repeated, tasting the name on my lips. It shouldn’t have suited him. It seemed too ordinary, too flat. Too dorky. But somehow, it was perfect.

“I’m Sienna.” There should have been more shame here, more awkwardness. I felt none.

“I know,” he replied.

My stomach dipped.

“Is this your job, driving women around?” I wasn’t exactly curious about women who came before me. And there had been women before me, I wasn’t naïve enough to think this was the first time this man had done something like this. But I also knew that no woman who came before was like me. My interest was in Felix, on where he fit in to all of this.

“I have many jobs,” he returned.

There was nothing menacing about the sentence. At least there shouldn’t have been. But something about the way he said it had the hairs at the nape of my neck standing at attention.

I bit the inside of my lip. “You’re someone important,” I deduced. Someone dangerous. “Other people could be driving me right now.”

“They could,” he agreed, eyes meeting mine.

“Then why aren’t they?” I asked after silence descended for a handful of moments.

“Because no one else other than me will be driving you,” he replied, voice cold, no nonsense.

I didn’t have any response to what he said, didn’t have any desire to continue any conversation. I was terrified of what would come out if I did.

Felix dropped me off without a word, without so much as a goodbye. But there was a knowing look in his eyes. One I hated. One that told me he’d be seeing me again.

He wouldn’t.

I made that promise to myself as my key turned in the lock. As I stared at the diamond on my left finger.

Guilt covered my body like blood, staining my pores the second I closed the door to our apartment. The ring on my finger suddenly felt heavy, weighing down my hand. My steps were stilted and slow, and I hated myself with every passing second. The smells of our home usually encircled me in comfort, safety, despite how things were between Pete and me right now.

I’d put a lot of effort, time and money into our one-bedroom apartment. It was my first true home, one that Pete had bought for us because he knew I loved the city, The Village. Sure, the property had been in his family for years, and he hadn’t paid the astronomical Manhattan real estate rates, but his family wasn’t the kind of people to just give him something for nothing. He’d still put a lot of his savings into this. Into us.

He’d been off lately, distracted, inattentive, always on his phone or his laptop. I’d been feeling unwanted, uncertain and pissed that my fiancé had been treating me like more of a roommate than his woman.

So I’d betrayed him. I’d forgotten he existed. I’d only just remembered what I’d done the second I walked in here. Before that, all I was thinking about was the discomfort that came with every step, the fact that I hadn’t showered since the last time we fucked because I wanted to smell like him, smell like us. Because I wanted to feel his dried cum on the insides of my thighs.