Collateral (Collateral Damage 1)

I haven’t seen what I look like yet. I know my hair’s up, and that they loaded me with so much mascara that it’s hard to blink, but apart from that, I don’t know.

Stefan clears his throat, gesturing to the door with a tilt of his head. The women straighten and scurry from the room. Is that how he thinks I’ll obey someday? Because I never will.

He never takes his eyes off me as I stand, becoming aware that I’m nervously turning the ring on my finger. I school my features, not quite looking at him because it would only inflate his ego to know I find him attractive.

Or I would find him attractive if I didn’t hate him.

“What?” I ask, happy my voice sounds almost bored.

He’s shaved so the scruff of earlier is gone and when, a moment later, he gives me his signature aren’t-you-a-piece-of-work grin, I see the dimple on his cheek. He steps into the room and closes the door.

“Turn.”

“What?”

“I want to see the back.”

“I’m not a thing.”

“You’re very beautiful, Gabriela,” he says, that grin gone.

The compliment—or maybe its delivery—catches me off guard.

I look away, feeling my face heat up.

Instead of thanking him, I look at the full-length mirror in the corner of the room and I’m not a vain person and looks are a freaking lottery and I know I got lucky, but okay, yes, this, what those women did, it looks good. I look older. Maybe even a little beautiful.

Like her. Like my mom.

I walk to the mirror and meet my own gaze. I reach out one finger and touch it to the glass and I feel suddenly, incredibly sad. My eyes fill up and fuck the eighty pounds of mascara on my lashes because I can’t cry unless I want to look like a raccoon. But this, the way they have my hair in this twist with the bangs pinned neatly to the side, and the dark makeup, I look exactly like my mom on her wedding day.

She was eighteen too. And Stefan is twenty-nine, just about the age my father was when he married her.

Ironic all these similarities.

Or just life’s cruel joke.

Stefan’s reflection as he comes up behind me makes me force those thoughts away. Makes me steel myself.

Show no weakness.

It’s the one thing I’m grateful to my father for teaching me. Although, it’s not that he meant to teach it on purpose. These men, men like my father or Stefan, they see an opening, any tiny crack in the surface, any chink in the armor, and they’ll attack. They’ll devour you whole.

I narrow my eyes and look up to meet his in the mirror.

His gaze slips down my back and I remember how the dress drapes at my lower back, the swell of my hips pronounced by the fabric collected there.

I realize then he’s holding a box and I don’t move when he opens it, lifts whatever is inside and tosses the empty box on the bed. He raises a long, gold chain over my head and closes the clasp at my neck and I remember that first night we met. When I didn’t know who he was. When he closed a blood-crusted necklace around my throat, and I thought he’d strangle me with the chain.

My fingers move to touch it as his brush my spine, just the very tips light as a feather as they trace the line of it, from the nape of my neck down, barely touching each vertebrae, making me shiver as they move lower, lower, stopping just where the dress stops.

His gaze follows the line of his hand and a moment later, he straightens. His eyes are darker when they meet mine in the mirror.

He clears his throat, reaches out to lightly touch my shoulders and turns me so I’m facing him.

His eyes trap mine and my throat goes dry because I’ve stopped breathing. I seem to do that around him, especially when he’s so close. It’s like there’s not enough oxygen in the room for the both of us. Like one of us has to give.

One will.

He touches my chin, lifts my face and with the pad of his thumb, wipes at my temple. His touch is so soft it’s almost not real and it’s so opposite this hard man. This brutal, dangerous man.

“Eyelash,” he says.

I blink away, nod. Because I don’t know what the fuck I’m thinking or should be thinking or feeling or anything.

He’s just picking off an eyelash, dummy.

He gestures for me to look back at the mirror.

I turn to it to see how the necklace, a simple, delicate gold thing, hangs all the way down my back with a single sparkling diamond like a pendulum, the weight at the end of the chain.

It’s beautiful.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

I turn back to him and think what a couple we make.