I collapse on the mattress and snuggle close to his body, even if I don’t believe him at all. “Likely story. You just want to shut me up.”
“Maybe, but my methods of shutting you up are much nicer than the ones I use on other people,” he points out.
“What would you do to me if Rafe were to sic you on me, like he said at dinner? What does that entail? I assume there are different levels, a variety of different methods, like you said before, to net different results. What would I get?”
He shakes his head at me, apparently torn between disbelief and amusement. “I can’t talk to you about the work I do for Rafe. You know that.”
“You can’t tell me just what you would do to me? I’m not asking for specifics about anyone else. Even if I wanted to, I can’t tell on you with hypotheticals.”
Cocking an eyebrow, he tells me, “You also need to stop talking about talking.”
“I was saying I couldn’t talk.”
“Every time your mouth opens, something that could get you into trouble pops out of it,” he informs me.
Flashing him a teasing smile, I say, “Just tell me what you’d do to me.”
“If you keep wording it that way, we’re going to have a problem,” he states.
If he keeps making promises like that, I’m going to keep wording it that way. “Maybe I like problems,” I tell him.
Utterly unimpressed, he says, “Yes, clearly you do.”
“If you sate my curiosity, I’ll stop bugging you about it. Would you cut off one of my fingers?” I ask, lifting my eyebrows. “Stuff me in your trunk and take me to an abandoned building? Clearly you enjoy tying me up, so I’m guessing rope would be involved. Probably duct tape over my mouth to shut me up. Would you just give me a good scare, or would you actually murder me? If you would murder me, how would you do it?”
“I draw the line at murdering pregnant women,” he states. “I wouldn’t murder you.”
“Even if Rafe told you to? Wouldn’t it be dangerous to disobey a direct order like that?”
“I’d tell him I killed you, but really I’d keep you stashed here and lock you up when I leave. I have the whole house equipped for a live-in hostage, in case you haven’t noticed. I could keep you here forever and he’d never know. Might still do that, depending on how things go.”
He’s probably joking Sin-style, without making that clear, but just in case he’s not, I tell him, “You can’t actually keep me here forever.”
“No?”
I shake my head. “Definitely not. My sister and brother-in-law will notice if I go missing indefinitely.”
“Vince would be ill-advised to step foot in Vegas,” Sin points out.
“Well, yeah, but he wouldn’t be here to fight with Rafe about crime stuff, he would be here to get me.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I ignore him and go on pointedly. “Anyway, I’m also only out of school for the summer. I can’t go to class if I’m chained to your bed in Vegas. There’s also the fact that I am currently pregnant, and if you keep me here for about 7 more months, there’s going to be a new addition I’m pretty sure you’re not prepared for. You wouldn’t have to put cuffs on it to keep it from leaving, but you would have to wake up for nightly feedings if I’m still chained to the bed.”
“At least it wouldn’t talk for a while,” he says, like he’s considering the idea.
“But it would cry and have a lot of needs. And without anyone else to talk to, I would probably want to talk to you even more. So, you’d come home every day to a lot of crying and talking and eventually you’d get so sick of all the noise, you’d kick us right out. Then Rafe would discover you didn’t kill me in the first place, and you would be in a whole lot of trouble.”
Sin gives me a funny look. “To clarify, you’re trying to talk me into murdering you?”
“Well, no. I was just going through the scenario. This is why you should let me go back home to my own life. You can get on with yours, I can get on with mine, Rafe can get on with his. Everybody wins. We can pretend this whole mess never even happened.”
Shaking his head more adamantly than I expected, he says, “That’s not how life works. There’s no going back from anything. Life doesn’t have an ‘undo’ command. There are actions and results, and once a move has been made, that’s it. Only pussies can’t own the consequences of their choices and shoulder the burden that comes along with them. Consequences are important. They teach you to make better choices going forward.”
The intensity of his statement is curious, the unbending vehemence behind his words. For all that I appreciate this rare peek into his thought process, though, I can’t help taking it a little personally. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Being a pussy? Shirking the consequences of my actions? You don’t think I might have learned anything already?”
“I think you’re here,” he says simply.