She stares at me in silence. Then, in a voice so low I can barely hear it, she says, “I don’t hate you.”
My heart pounding, I pull her closer and kiss her again. I kiss her all the way back into the city and right up until Kieran stops the car in the underground garage. Then I take my wife upstairs to the honeymoon suite and lock the door behind us.
I stalk toward her. Wide-eyed, she backs away from me.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Reyna. I swear on my mother’s grave, I’ll never harm you.”
“It’s just that every time I think I’ve seen your highest intensity level, you set a new record.”
The last thing I want is for her to think I’m in any way as psychotic as Enzo, so I point to a chair and order, “Sit. Fuck, I mean please sit down.”
I prop my hands on my hips and start to pace, because apparently, it’s the only way I know how to blow off steam without shooting something.
Reyna perches on the edge of the leather chair and watches me warily.
I stop in the middle of the room, blow out a hard breath, and close my eyes. “When I was nineteen years old, I fell in love with a married woman.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Be quiet. You’ll get your chance to talk.”
I don’t even have to look at her to know she’s murdering me with her eyes, but it doesn’t matter. Right now all that matters is that I clear the air between us. I need to get her naked and into bed, and that won’t happen if she’s still angry with me.
I walk over to the bar and pour myself a scotch. I chug it, then hold up the empty glass.
“No, thank you.”
“Suit yourself.” I pour another and drink that, too. Then I set down the glass, turn around, and fold my arms over my chest as I lean against the marble bar top.
I have no idea how to say what needs to be said, so I decide to try to get through it with as few words as possible.
I draw a slow breath, blow it out, then speak.
“Her name was Shannon. She was five years older than I was. We met at a rugby match. She told me she was married, but I didn’t care. I pursued her relentlessly. Eventually, she gave in.”
My laugh is low and humorless. “I can be very persistent when I want something.”
I’m lost in dark memories for a moment, then shake my head to clear it. Reyna watches me in taut, unblinking silence.
“Her husband found out. I don’t know how. I also didn’t know he was in the Serbian mafia.”
Reyna’s lips part. Her hands tighten around the arms of the chair.
She senses what’s coming.
I look right into her eyes when I make my confession.
“He killed her for her betrayal. Slit her throat and left her body on my front lawn. Then he went to my parents’ house, first thing that same morning. They were still in bed when he put a bullet in both their heads.”
I’m keeping it together until the next part, where my voice breaks.
“He killed my little sister, too. Slit her throat the same way he did Shannon’s. Police said later she didn’t die right away. Took her a while to choke to death on her own blood. Hannah was twelve.”
Reyna lifts her hands to cover her mouth.
I close my eyes again so I don’t have to see the look of horror in hers.
“Next he went to my grandparents’ houses. He bound them and lit the house on fire, same thing with both. All four of them were burned alive.”
Reyna says faintly, “Oh God. Quinn.”
“Don’t call for God yet. It gets worse. My older sister lived with her husband and three young children. The husband he tied up and bludgeoned to death. All three kids he shot at point-blank range. I won’t tell you what he did to my sister. She was a very pretty girl. Then he went through the rest of my family, one by one, picking them off like fish in a barrel. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Their kids, husbands, and wives. By the time he was through, forty-two people had been murdered. My entire family tree was wiped out. Because of me.”
I have to stop to catch my breath. I didn’t realize my voice had gone hoarse as I’d been speaking.
“I was nineteen years old, and responsible for unimaginable carnage.”
Reyna says softly, “Quinn, you were just a boy. He was the one who was responsible, not you.”
I lift my head and look at her, my warrior wife who survived fourteen years of abuse at the hands of a madman, and feel such an overwhelming wave of worthlessness, I can barely speak. When I do, it comes out in a rasp.
“No. All that blood is on my hands. It started because of my selfishness. So when a Russian assassin who was sent to kill Declan kidnapped Sloane’s sister right from under my fucking nose, this innocent girl I was responsible for protecting…I went a little crazy. I relived my own personal hell all over again. And when I woke up this morning, I suddenly realized that by marrying you, I might have signed your death warrant. That even though I took my revenge on Urosevic for what he did to Shannon and my family, maybe his curse still followed me after all these years.”
I swallow, then say gruffly, “That’s why I was upset. Not because I’m in love with someone else. Because I’m responsible for you now. And if something happens to you, it will be the end of me.”
She stares at me across the room in silence. Her mermaid eyes drill into me, straight down into my soul.
Then she stands, crosses to me, and throws her arms around my shoulders.
33
Rey
He hides his face in my neck and squeezes me so tightly, I’m left breathless.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “Thank you for telling me that. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, but I’m so glad I know.”
His voice cracks when he says, “Why?”
“Because what I want more than anything is to know you. The real you that you keep hidden under all those smirks and that awful macho swaggering.”
“Look who’s talking. You’ve got so many ancient hell witch costumes, I can’t keep up with them all.”
I pull away, frame his face in my hands, and gently kiss him on the lips. Looking deep into his eyes, I say, “They’re not costumes.”
After a beat, we both start laughing.
It’s soft and grim, but laughter nonetheless.
I kiss him again. He drops his forehead to my shoulder and exhales. A shudder runs through his big body. I can tell he’s deeply affected by the story he just told me, that saying it aloud was excruciating and brought back horrible memories along with a mountain of guilt. But for the first time, I’m grateful for his insistence on talking things out.
But there’s one last item on the agenda that I’m not about to let go.
I pull away from him and wait until he raises his head and looks at me to say, “A small public service announcement: if you ever refer to me as ‘pussy’ again, I’ll break your face.”
He pulls his brows together. “What?”
“I heard what you told Declan about me.”
After a moment, he understands. “You were earwigging at the door?”
“If that’s an obscure Irish word for eavesdropping, then yes.”
He raises his voice. “Then you should’ve heard me tell him that I was being an idiot when I said that.”
“I’d already left by then.”
“Also,” he says, talking over me, “I didn’t even fucking know you when Declan and I had that conversation. I was talking about Lili, not you.”
“Stop talking, Quinn. You’re only digging your grave deeper.”
He stares at me for a beat in tense silence. “You’re always going to think the worst of me, aren’t you?”
“Don’t get dramatic. You’re telling me I heard something out of context, and I’m accepting that.”
His brows shoot up. “But you don’t believe it?”
I can tell he’s on the verge of another outburst. I don’t want a repeat of the episode we had in the car where I get another angry tirade shouted into my face, so I pull away from him and walk slowly over to the windows.
As I stare down at the city lights, an overwhelming sense of exhaustion settles over me.
I’m thirty-three, childless, with no career or work experience. I was raised in an environment of shame and fear by people who didn’t love each other. All I’ve ever known from every man who was supposed to care for me is violence. I’m jaded, cynical, and broken in so many places, there’s not enough glue in the world to put me back together.
And I’m starting to have real feelings for a man who might be even more broken than I am.
I say, “I believe both of us have problems that we’re not going to fix tonight. I have trauma over my past. You have trauma over yours. Both of us are haunted by bad memories. I believe you wanted an arranged marriage to try to escape all that and find some peace, but you got me instead. A woman who has as many scars as she does demons. I believe we have an intense physical connection, but neither of us knows how to live with ourselves, let alone another person.”
I turn from the window and look at him. “I also believe you would’ve let Lili out of the contract if you’d known about Juan Pablo sooner.”