When he places me on the cool lavender sheets, I turn my face into the pillow and close my eyes. I’m expecting him to leave like he did last night.
The bed dips. He comes behind me, his arm slung over my waist, his legs tangling with mine. The heavy down comforter covers us both, and I can’t help the sigh of gratitude.
“Go to sleep,” he says, his voice low.
Something about the way he says it, I know he isn’t going to sleep. So what is he doing here? Holding me? This isn’t part of paid-for sex. It isn’t revenge. Something else has his arm tightening around me, his face pressed into my half-damp hair.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He stiffens behind me. “Why would you say that?”
“It didn’t hurt.” More than that, it felt amazing. Soul restoring. After months of watching my life crumble around me, he built me back up. If only for a few minutes.
“Christ,” he mutters, his hand clenching and releasing on my arm. “You deserve more than not hurting. Don’t you get that? You deserve more than this.”
I’m not sure I deserved to be sold like cattle, but I didn’t deserve the fancy clothes, the best schools either. Life isn’t about what you deserve, it’s about making the best of what you have. And what I have is a strong, warm man holding me. “Then let me go.”
He laughs softly. “I never claimed to do the right thing.”
Maybe not right. That money would save me, though. Enough to save my father’s house, to pay for his care after this month is over. Maybe enough to send me to college again. Did he think of all that when he spoke his bid aloud? Or had he only been concerned with winning? I’m not sure the distinction even matters, only the result.
I nestle deeper into his arms. “What did your father do? Besides make moonshine?”
“You mean petroleum? I can’t believe you drank that stuff.”
A flush comes to my cheeks as I remember the wild feeling of being drunk. “Was it like one hundred percent alcohol?”
“It was one hundred percent reckless,” he mutters. “You need to keep your defenses up with someone like me. That means staying sober, for starters. Sleeping with a knife under your pillow won’t hurt.”
I remember Candy’s warning. Your mind. Your soul. That’s your leverage.
Of course I hadn’t asked—leverage against what? Maybe she just meant keeping my sanity, my dignity in the face of the auction. That’s what I’d been worried about. Shame. Humiliation. But maybe she meant something worse. Something more treacherous. As if I should be on my guard. As if I’m in danger.
“You put me to bed,” I reminded him. He’d had the perfect chance to hurt me then, when I would have been helpless to fight him, but he hadn’t.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “He was a liar. A thief.”
I blink, realizing that he’s telling me something true. Something precious enough that he wouldn’t normally share it. “You hated him.”
“I looked up to him, which was fucking stupid.”
Every little boy looks up to his father. Little girls, too.
“You were a kid,” I say, somewhat offended by his judgment of himself. I realize that there’s a parallel between him and myself, but I choose not to follow that line of thinking.
“He never said anything that was true, almost as a matter of principle. He just conned as many people as he could meet, trying to get money so my mother could snort it, shoot it, drink it.”
My stomach clenches. “She was an addict?”
“If you could get addicted, it was her favorite thing.”
I swallow hard, glad he can’t see the sympathy on my face. Harper’s mother is an addict too. Most of the time she refuses to talk about it, but a few times, at night in our room at college, she would whisper in the dark about the fear, the dread. Hiding under the blankets at night while her mother was on a rampage, throwing everything in the house.
“I’m sorry for drinking your father’s last moonshine,” I say. “And if it bothered you to see me like that.”
“I don’t keep it to drink,” he says gruffly. “I keep it to remember him. To remember what not to be.”
A liar. A cheat. “That’s why it bothers you so much when someone steals from you.”
The reason he ruined my father. It wasn’t only about setting an example for the rest of the criminal underworld. It was about setting an example for himself. About fighting back for every time his own father must have told him a lie.
It’s King Minos who puts his bastard child into the Labyrinth. Not to kill him but to keep him locked away. The maze that Gabriel walks isn’t a physical one, despite the large manor that he lives in. It’s the emotional walls, the ones that make him strike out at people who get too close.