A shudder wracked my entire body, an echo of my climax.
“You taste good,” she told me in a fluttery, almost giddy voice. “You taste like I always imagined you would.”
“Killin’ me,” I told her as I leaned down to pick her up beneath her armpits and haul her easily into my arms. Her legs wrapped around me naturally, her ass cradled in my hands like she’d been made to sit there.
“Needed that,” I admitted reluctantly. “I hurt you?”
She nuzzled into my neck, then tipped her nose into my beard and rubbed it there, inhaling my scent. “Mmm, just enough, thank you.”
A hoarse chuckle left me. “Right. Got it that my Little Shadow likes it rough.”
“Only with you,” she agreed sleepily, settling into my hold as though she could sleep there.
A residual cramp of panic seized my gut, but I forced myself past it so I could turn off the water and get us out of the thickly steamed shower. She protested in an exhausted murmur when I tried to let her down to dry her with a fluffy orange towel, so I did a half-assed job of it with her in my arms still pressed to my dripping clothes.
By the time I carried her to her canopied bed, she was passed out, soft breath fanning against my throat. My arms convulsed around her when I thought about setting her beneath the pink satin sheets.
I didn’t want to let her go.
I didn’t want to leave the house the way I knew I should, and I definitely didn’t want to let her out of my sight now or ever.
She was mine, mine, mine.
I gritted my teeth as emotions bubbled and boiled in my gut. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I was helpless to act against them. Instead, I sat my ass on the edge of that girly as fuck bed and held my girly girl in my arms for a long time as she slept. The night outside grew darker, Sampson stalked into the room and curled up on a pillow with a little glare at me for stealing his mistress, and still, I couldn’t let her out of my arms.
She fit there.
She fit against my chest, in the space between my ribs, in the hole where there should have been a human heart. Maybe that was it—maybe she was my heart, living wrongly outside my body, and that was why I felt this way.
Like we should never be parted.
Like we should give in to our twin ambitions and stalk each other until the end of time.
Finally, when dawn peeked its pale forehead over the horizon, I made myself let her go. She slipped between the covers with a little murmur and a frown between her pale brows I smoothed with my thumb.
Then I found ways to stay in that absurd pink house with the vintage furniture and the girly décor. I cleaned up that fucking snowman cup, stared at Delilah as she cooed in her cage, and mopped up the spill of water in her bathroom with those fluffy ass towels.
Somehow, I found myself in front of the ornate gold mirror and caught sight of my reflection. Those empty eyes, pale and green as always, didn’t look the way they usually did.
They weren’t tired and wane, empty as jade vases.
They were bright, lit by some inner flame Bea had ignited like a torch that wouldn’t extinguish.
Agony flared through me, followed swiftly by anger.
I couldn’t feel again.
I couldn’t go through that again.
Mam, Pa, Keely, Danae.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Mute. Dead.
Me. Dead. Having died in that church a long time ago beneath a stained-glass window that hung in The Fallen MC chapel.
Despite it all, I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the land of the living by one much too young and entirely too naïve girl with moonshine hair and a soul drawn dangerously to my dark.
Without thinking, I reared back and punched my right hand into the mirror. It cracked into an elaborate web, my feral face at its center. My knuckles, already raw from beating in Cal Mulligan’s face, were torn open and bleeding heavily.
I dipped my finger into one of the open wounds, pressing ruthlessly so my panic smoothed into pain. I took a few deep breaths through my gritted teeth to center myself in it and then resolved to get the fuck out of that honey-trap of a house.
Before I did, something in me forced me to stop.
To take my blood-painted fingertip and brush a message for Bea on the porcelain bowl of the sink.
A rún mo chroí.
Secret of my heart.
And as I left the house, locking the door behind me with the spare key I’d found in a drawer in the kitchen, and made my way to my bike where I waited until Wrath, Bat, and, surprisingly, Dane, turned up to take guard duty, I felt exactly as if I had left whatever semblance I had of a heart and soul curled up in a pink bed in that pink house.