“Don’t even talk to me about the rain!”
“You wanted to talk, so I’m talking to you now.” He walks forward, stopping in front of me, the faint smile tugging his lips holding an infinite amount of sadness. “This isn’t how I wanted to spend your birthday, Melanie.” His voice is a tender murmur, squeezing my heart.
I won’t cry, I won’t fucking cry. I blink and swallow.
“All I ask is that you let me celebrate you when I get back. If I only get to spend one day with you, I want to spend this day. With you.”
I can’t stand the way he knows me. The way he understands me. The way he makes my every dream come true and breaks my every fantasy. If there were a day I’d need him in a year, it would be my birthday. But suddenly I desperately need to go home.
“You’re leaving right now?” I whisper.
His eyebrows rise inquiringly. “I have to. Just one more mark. I owe it to my mother.”
He comes over and wraps me in his arms. I close my eyes as his heat envelops me, his scent, him. When he tries to pull away, I pull his arms closer, suddenly just needing this a minute longer. “Why do you want my arms?” he whispers in my ear. “I just told you they’ve done more harm than good.”
“Not to me.”
“Because you fell for me, you fell for me and all my bullshit, and even with everything I just said, you’re still falling, aren’t you,” he rasps. He kisses the back of my ear. “I’m right here to catch you.” He kisses the back of my ear, harder. “Let me catch you.”
I duck my head to compose myself.
He ducks his dark head too and glances at my toes. On each foot, my toenails spell, in perfect blue and hot pink all the way around, GREY ?
“Nice toes.”
I curl and tuck them into the rug. “I got a pedicure. At the best place in Seattle.”
All for you . . . I think miserably.
His grin gives me butterflies in my stomach, and I wish I had an ax and I could literally kill them. “That someone could get you to sit your restless little ass for a while to get to do that is a testament to their abilities.” He looks at me with those eyes that reach strange little places inside me, and my stomach starts to feel heavy from the complete overload of my emotions. “Or to your conviction to wear my name on your feet?”
He kneels, and I hold my breath as he takes my toe and kisses it.
“Grey, you’re kissing my toe,” I say, voice thick and cottony.
“It’s got my name on it.”
When I pry my foot loose, he exhales a long, long breath and rises to his feet, to over six feet of beautiful lying man, then he quietly starts getting some of the stuff on the bed into his black jacket. I stare into the shadows, watching him slip on his gloves, feeling like this innocence I just lost will never, ever be recovered.
“I feel like my boyfriend just died. I will never, ever, have Greyson anymore.”
If I sound sad, he looks wrecked.
“I feel like my alias just killed my girl. And she’ll never look at me the way she did before.”
We stare the way we do, except we usually smile here.
This time we don’t.
Go home, Melanie, I think miserably.
He steps forward cautiously, and I remember how obsessed he is with my eyes, and I feel a strange sadness for him when he somehow cups my face, thinks about kissing them, but drops his hands instead.
“I’ll be back. Stay here with your friend for the day tomorrow, and think, Melanie. When I’m back, I dare you to look into my eyes and tell me you don’t want me.”
I don’t know what he’s going to do, but terror, lust, love, every emotion swims in me as he crosses the room to leave. “Greyson, swear to me that you won’t kill anyone!” I cry. “Swear, or we will have nothing to talk about. Nothing.”
My heart pounds in my temples, my chest, my fingertips as I wait for his answer to my impulsive ultimatum. He stands by the door and laughs softly, then he pulls something from his jacket, pulls off the cartridge from his gun, sets it down, and swings the door open. He didn’t give me his word, but I believe him.
I don’t know why, but I believe him.
I wait until he shuts the door behind him to have the mother of all nervous fucking breakdowns.
TWENTY-ONE
* * *
THE LIST
Greyson
It was an easy mark.
I slip inside the darkened home, wake him up with the tip of my SIG right on his temple while he startles up in bed. He shook like a flag in the wind as he opened the safe, gave me the money.
He’ll probably never again sleep.
Welcome to the club, old man . . .
But I’m not thinking about that anymore. His name is scratched, the fights were good tonight. Riptide owned the ring—and that’s fine by me. Riptide is money, and the Underground is all about money.
But I’m not thinking about that either.
I’m thinking about her. Wondering if she’s sleeping. Or even half as tortured as I am. It’s six a.m. at the hospital, and I’ve been sitting here, hating what I already know.
Hating that I already know what she’s going to tell me later on today when I go to see her.
That I don’t deserve her, am a liar, a con, and not the man she wants and it’s fucking. Eating. Me. Alive.
Can’t sit still. Can’t stop going over shit in my head.
I’ve sat all night at the hospital watching my father struggle to breathe.
I feel choked myself, the air clogged in my lungs. I knew what my life was, what I wanted. It was all clear.
Nothing is clear anymore except that I can’t imagine continuing a day without her. If she won’t have me, I already know I will be obsessed. I will stalk her. I won’t be able to let go of her. I will need to be sure that she’s safe, that she’s herself, that she’s laughing. I’ll have to see someone else touch her. The man she wanted—the man I couldn’t be. My heart thrashes in my chest. A firestorm rages in my body at the thought of anyone touching her but me.
But I won’t be the Hades that drags my Persephone into hell with him.