Blaze (Virtues & Lies 3)

Perhaps the really sick part was me believing that I could belong to someone. It’s where everything has gone wrong. I believed, hoped, and thought about everything wrong. I made assumptions.

“So—” I shrug, putting my best no shits given smile on my face. “—how are you going to save me?”

I hate the pity on his face, and I hate that it makes my mask slip.

“Or are you here to take me back? Save my baby and then get rid of me?” I look up at Ryan beside me, and it’s not until I look around that I realise I’ve moved closer to him. To safety.

I don’t know when he went from being the man that took me away from the life I was falling in love with, to my newfound safety.

“She’d be an orphan, you know?”

He blinks away the surprise in his eyes, focusing on my belly. “No one’s taking her away from you, or vice versa. A child always belongs with its mother. No matter what.”

Standing, he comes closer, stopping right in front of me. Hands fisted at his sides, Lucian looks down on me. There’s something so familiar about the way he smiles. The kind of familiar you recognise from every day of your life. As though as it’s something engrained in me or maybe a part of me.

He raises his hand, and I have to fight the urge to move away or flinch, because I’ve heard what he did to Leo’s mother. Maybe the reason he feels so familiar is because he reminds me of Leo with his high cheekbones and regal slope of his nose. Almost like they belong on a sculpture with how perfect they are.

His hand rests on my head lightly, thumb brushing back the wayward strands that have pulled from the knot at my nape. When he strokes down to the side of my face, his hand feels so warm that it’s impossible not to burrow into it when I feel so cold.

“You’re all her,” he murmurs before dropping his hand to his side and turning towards the living area.

I find Ryan the minute Lucian is out of sight. “Why do you think he’s really here?”

“Are you asking me if he’s a threat?” He doesn’t tilt his head to look down at me as he usually does. I don’t think he can.

I nod, guiding him to one of the chairs where I tug him down. Ryan’s compliance is surprising given he’s been every bit as standoffish and stubborn as I am.

He sits, hands hovering in the air, over my hips as though he’s uncertain on what to do with them.

“I’d say he feels a sense of duty.” Hands falling to his thighs, he allows me to peel his jacket back.

“Why? He doesn’t owe me anything. He doesn’t know me.” I pull the collar of his T-shirt, trying to get a look at the wound. “I didn’t even know he knew my mother until recently.”

Ryan shrugs with a wince, looking away from me. “I’m sure Lucian has his reasons.”

I go to the sink and let the water run for a while as I go through the kitchen cupboards in search of anything we can use to clean him up.

I grab a glass bowl and stick it under the hot flowing water while I continue looking for a cloth or something.

“You can’t use that,” Lucian tells me when I find a cloth in one of the drawers. “I have an emergency kit. If you would boil me some water, I can top it up with some of this.” He holds up a large bottle of water. “We need to get the top off.”

Ryan looks between the two of us. I never had him pegged as a shy guy.

When he doesn’t co-operate, Lucian pulls out a pocketknife—the sight of it makes my insides twist painfully, triggering another achy tightening around my back and the top of my belly—and without any fanfare, he cuts a hole in the top before tearing it off Ryan.

I’m struck immobile. All those tattoos…he’s covered. More so than Casper. He has the same elements that Casper did. The roses, the lion, the spider’s web, and that seahorse I loved. It was the most unusual tattoo he had. The seahorse over the left side of his chest.

Protection, perception, and persistence. Nature’s skilled assassin.

That was the answer Casper gave me when I asked what it meant.

How apt for him.

I thought it was cute compared to the others. All equally beautiful, but they were all masculine, even the roses with their black-shaded petals. All dark and ominous and hypnotising death flowers I loved. I still love.

Trudging closer, I trace the lines of the design on Ryan’s torso with my stare. Heaven and hell in one ornate depiction, with the dark shaded seahorse morphing into the detailed side of the grim reaper’s face at his navel.

And I love that seahorse even if it brings tears to my eyes.