Blaze (Virtues & Lies 3)

“You?”

“I’m jealous.” My whisper is hoarse as he comes closer, his arms wrapping around me. “I’m jealous that you got to do something I haven’t had a chance to. I was too sick before, and now…I’m stuck here. I’m a prisoner of my own safety. Isn’t that tragic?”

Casper’s big, warm hands cradle my head to his chest with his heart hammering into my ear.

“It won’t be forever,” he rumbles, lips pressing to the top of my head even though there’s no kiss to follow the action. It’s just his thumbs running along my temple and my cheekbone while I try to hold all my tears in as hard as I can.

For a moment, I allow myself to forget everything. I force our surroundings away, and I relish his warmth and his touch. Letting him hold me, I focus on his solid and unshakable strength. With every fierce and violent thud of his heart, I sink into him.

“I swear, Trouble, I’ll set

you free. You only need to trust me a bit longer.”

I’m not sure what that means, but everything in me protests at his words. I don’t want him to set me free. I want him to keep me. I’ll be his prisoner if that’s what it takes.

Something’s wrong, I can feel it. The more I try to ignore it, the more it weighs on me. Not even my sketching is helping. I’m so wound up.

The blood and his lie. The way he keeps checking the doors whenever he goes past or makes up a reason to go past them. Even the way he’s bolted the shutters from the inside when we’ve never closed them before.

Casper knows I hate the dark, and it’s not only dark in here, it’s pitch-black as he walks me through to the lounge like he has night vision or something.

“I know something isn’t right. It’s obvious,” I tell him when he sits me down on the sofa. “I’m not dense or blind, you know.”

He ignores me, fussing with the aerial because there’s no internet or any kind of service out here. Even the phone network is pot luck.

“Keep ignoring me if you want, but I’m going to keep hounding you until all your precious silence is gone.”

My threat doesn’t seem to bother him at all as he stands in front of the screen, flicking through the channels. There’s nothing except soaps and the news, and he doesn’t like it when I watch the news programmes because they’re all still talking about my father and how he’s left the government in shambles.

“That blood wasn’t yours.” I made a point of checking closely when I collected his plate from the table earlier. “There isn’t a single scratch on you.”

He blows out a long breath, still not giving me what I want.

“Whose blood was it, Casper?”

His hand fists at his side as his jaw clenches, but his aloofness is frustrating as hell and I’m all out of patience.

“Fine.” Getting up, I manage to make it to the front door before he spits, “You take one more step and I promise you, it will be the last thing you do of your own free will. And the only tragic thing will be when they find your body washed up.”

“I’m not scared of you.”

He turns, looking every bit the monster I know he can be, in the dim light. “You should be because I don’t have limits. There is no such thing as right or wrong to me, it’s all angles. And if you threaten to hurt what’s mine, you can be sure that I will hurt you.”

His stoic stance and the monotone of his voice do nothing to disguise the pure violence within him. And it should scare me, it really fucking should, but if anything, I am as enthralled by it as a moth to a flame. There’s a hole inside me that craves to be filled by it—his darkness and his savagery.

“Now, sit the fuck down before I tie you down.”

A manic cackle bursts from me. “Make me, big man. If you’re so bad and so mean…do your worst.”

The dry laugh that rumbles from him is as sinister as the bleakness surrounding us, and the closer he comes, the harder my heart pumps and my blood whooshes through me. Heat and hate and poisonous anger roar inside me. In a move not even I saw coming, I reach beneath the top of the shallow table by the front door. Grabbing the gun he showed me the first time he left me here on my own, I aim.

Right. At. Him.

I keep my fingers on either side of the trigger because the only safety is the lever on it.

Adrenaline trembles through my body as he stops in front of me. Chest flush to the muzzle. Hands on his lean hips. Shadows contorting his handsome face into that of a monster.

Be scared, I keep urging myself, but I’m not. If anything, my fingers itch to pull the trigger. Something inside me relishes the weight of the weapon in my hand.