A Worthy Opponent (Wicked Villains 3)

“Stop staring at me.”

Apparently she’s more aware of her surroundings than she seems. I walk to the bed and drop onto it. My whole fucking body aches after today, and I can’t even blame the workout I snuck in before lunch. It’s stress, pure and simple. I still manage to dredge up a grin for her. “I like watching you.”

“Creeper.”

“Voyeur,” I correct.

She finally lifts her head to glare. “Pretty sure we both already knew that.”

“Indeed.” I allow myself to take her in fully, to let her see how much I appreciate the view. She’s wearing a pair of jeans that look worn and comfortable and hug her ass and hips in a way I truly appreciate. A fluttery green crop top gives flashes of her stomach beneath. She looks as fresh-faced as a college girl, and it’s like viewing the woman I know through a lens of what-if. If things had fallen out differently, she’d have already graduated college. She’d be exactly as wholesome and innocent as she looks right now, standing there with her bare feet and toes painted pink.

Tink narrows her eyes. “What’s got that look on your face? You look almost … wistful.”

I could lie, but I’m curious about how she’ll respond. “You look like the horrors of our world have never touched you.”

She snorts. “Shows what you know. Appearances are deceiving. That’s literally my job now; helping my clients accomplish the image they’re trying to project, all without saying a word.”

“If you hadn’t met Peter—”

“Stop.” She carefully sticks the remaining pins into a cushion that looks remarkably like Hades’s head. “I can’t afford to play the what-if game. There’s a reason he found it so easy to get to me. My life wasn’t as bad as a lot of kids’ experience in foster care, but it wasn’t easy, either. Whatever rose-tinted vision of this alternate universe you’re looking at, it’s not what would have happened.” She shakes her head. “I can’t look back, Hook. I can’t. It’s what he wants, it’s why he’s trying to show up and fuck up my life all over again. I won’t let him win.”

The thought of Peter winning anything, of what it would mean, leaves me cold. “I won’t let him.”

Her attitude melts away, and she gives a sad little smile. “It’s not like he’s going to ask your permission first.”

I push to my feet and cross to her. Without her heels, she barely hits my shoulder. Tink gives the impression of being bulletproof now, but I know better. I’ve seen her broken and terrified. I’d do damn near anything to avoid seeing it again. “I won’t let him touch you,” I repeat.

“Don’t make promises you’ve already broken.”

She keeps saying she doesn’t want to talk about the past, and then she nails me to the fucking cross and crucifies me based on shit that happened in that same shared history.

If not for the frustration riding me hard, I would never let my control slip enough to say, “You don’t get to lay that sin at my feet. I tried to get you out. The first chance I got, I offered to get you away.”

I can still remember that night, how fucking scared shitless I was. Both my father and Peter were out of the building for the first time in months. I had a truck parked on the corner, and Nigel had risked his neck by stashing enough cash to at least get her out of Carver City. To get us both out if it came to that. We hadn’t interacted more than a scattering of words over the years, but she had to know I had the best of intentions. I wasn’t one of Peter’s men. I never had been, for all that I was trapped in the territory, same as her.

When I laid it out for her, Tink stared at me with lifeless eyes out of a wasted face sporting a new bruise on her cheekbone, and told me to take my escape and go fuck myself.

I still don’t know why.

She doesn’t look lifeless now. No, she looks like she wants to knee me in the balls. “That’s not fair.”

“It sure as fuck isn’t; just like you blaming me for shit like I didn’t try to help.”

“You call that help?” She laughs hoarsely and moves away from me, charging into the kitchen and hauling out a bottle of vodka. “You idiot. Do you really think Peter didn’t have little spies who reported my every move, my every conversation to him? That he wasn’t ready to take any sign of disobedience and punish me until I wished I was dead?” She flashes me a dark look. “We never would have made it out of the building. And we wouldn’t have survived the night.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I sure as hell do know that.”