I scrub hard—so hard my skin starts to turn a light shade of red. I don’t stop scrubbing until I hear a noise outside the bathroom.
I rinse and then grab a cotton robe, stepping onto the glossy tile floor and walking out to the bedroom.
Draco stands in front of the entryway of the balcony, his back to me. His hair is a mess—disheveled and wild. He’s grown facial hair, which doesn’t look bad on him at all.
I have never seen him like this. He always used to look so well put together. Clean, neat, and shaved. Now, it seems he couldn’t care less. And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s too focused and determined to worry about his appearance at the moment.
“Why did you kill him today?” he asks without looking back.
I study him for a split second. His breaths are steady. He doesn’t seem hostile. When his head turns, eyes sparking and expecting an answer, I say, “He wasn’t going to tell you anything useful. He kept his mouth shut for months because he was loyal to her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Draco, you had him tortured and dismembered, and he still didn’t talk. Not once did he waver or crack. That’s loyalty. He wanted to protect her until his dying breath. He loved her more than his own life.”
He turns fully, looking me all over. Grabbing the hem of his shirt and tugging it over his head, he reveals his solid body. The beautiful ripples of his muscles glow from the candlelight, the curves and dips in his back impossible to look away from. He seems so soft, smooth, and perfect on the surface, but deep inside, he’s a battered, broken-down beast with a thousand walls and a soul harder than steel.
After a brief silence, he says, “I know what you’re trying to do, Gianna.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re trying to gain my trust back. Believe me,” he says, peering over his shoulder, “it’ll take more than a few kills to gain that back. What you did was unforgivable.”
I feel my throat tighten, my eyes shifting to the terrace. “How long?”
“How long what?” he asks, slightly irritated as he unbuttons his jeans.
“How long until you can trust me again?”
“Trust is not something I just hand out. I started to trust you, and you betrayed me. No matter what I feel, trusting you again won’t come easy.”
I don’t know why that pains me so much to hear. My beating heart seems to slow in speed, the thumping a somber beat in my own ears as I study him.
Pulling my eyes away, I walk to the terrace, stepping out, the coolness of the cement kissing the bottoms of my feet.
I grip the rail and stare ahead at the ocean. The moon is perched at the end of the dark horizon, the milky light rippling with the calm waves.
Heat presses against my backside seconds later, and a strong arm closes around me. His mouth presses on the back of my neck, and he gives me a soft, simple kiss. Warm. Slightly damp. Enough to send a gush of heat tunneling through my entire body, pinging me right in the core.
“Like I said,” he whispers, dragging his lips up to the back of my ear. “I want to hate you just as much as I want to love you right now. Nothing about that has changed.”
“I don’t know what else to do to get you to trust me, Draco.” I turn in his arms, meeting his brown gaze. “I’m here with you. I came back; I found you.” I press a palm to his chest and push a little to get a deeper look into his eyes.
“Forcing it won’t make it any better.” He tips my chin when I start to drop my gaze. “But what you did today made me proud.”
A smile tingles the edges of my lips. “Me killing someone made you proud?”
“You did it for me.”
“And I would do it again.”
His face turns serious. He lifts his head, looking over me, at the ocean. “When we find her, she is mine to kill.”
I nod, twisting to look at the moon. “I know.” I sigh. “I would say I’m sorry again, but like you said, apologies are useless. They don’t help anything.”
“That’s right,” he responds, voice husky, deep.
“I missed you,” I whisper.
The pads of his fingers tickle the curve of my neck, his lips on top of my head. “How can you miss a man like me?” he asks in my hair, his fingers pressing into my skin. “After all that has happened to you because of me…how?”
That’s a good question—one I constantly have to ask myself. I have no idea why I missed him. I should have left this world and never looked back.
Meeting Draco Molina changed my life drastically, and I really am not sure if it was for the better or for the worse. My life was once so simple, so stable, but now, at every turn, there is someone or something lurking. Someone will always be out for me. To the world, I will always be a target, because he loves me, and if anything ever happens to me, he will let it be known how important I was to him.