“I’m not the only owner.”
“You own a fifth of it, but it’s an equal share,” I amended. “You live in a world where men buy multiple women who are stolen from their lives, and where rape is a form of teaching those women a lesson. But somehow you’ve all twisted your minds to believe that raping them is still better than what they had before.”
Lucas’s eyes had gradually hardened with each point I brought up, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “What’s your point, and what do my arms have to do with this?”
Without looking, I moved my hand down to where one of his tattoos began, the design wrapping around the inside of his left forearm. “These don’t fit.”
His eyebrows ticked up. “You don’t like my tattoos?”
“I didn’t say that. I said they don’t fit with the guy I just described. Especially not yours.” Before he could respond, I let my fingers slide up, tracing a long scar. “And neither do these. People have scars, Lucas, but you have so many,” I whispered as I moved to another, and then another. I studied the scar I was touching high up on his arm, and asked, “What happened to you?”
“That one was a bullet.”
My head snapped up at his reply. I hadn’t expected him to answer me, and I would’ve never expected that response. “What?”
But no matter how much I silently begged him to repeat himself, hoping that maybe I’d heard him wrong, he just stared at me as a minute passed by.
“Why were you shot?”
Instead of answering, he turned the conversation around to me. “Why do you stop singing when I walk into the room?”
As it had so often with Kyle, my body tensed. And just as I’d known I’d had Lucas not two minutes before, he now knew he had me.
He didn’t wait long for a response, and from the look he was giving me, he hadn’t expected one. He curled his large hand around my neck and traced feather-soft circles against my throat with his thumb as he spoke. “You don’t need me to tell you that your voice is beautiful; you already know it is. But you stop when you know I can hear you, and you sing when you’re scared . . . like it’s an involuntary reaction you can’t stop even though I could tell in those first days that you’d wanted to.” Another sweep of his thumb across my throat had my fear receding and my breaths growing heavy. “Now tell me, Briar, why would someone with a voice like yours be so afraid of it?”
Again, my body stilled, but it no longer had anything to do with the suspicion that crept through my body whenever anyone mentioned my voice . . .
Kyle had asked me countless times what I’d had to be afraid of when it came to singing, implying that I was good enough to do anything I wanted with my voice. But he’d never once in the years we’d been together noticed that I sang when scared, just as he’d never noticed I was afraid of my own voice.
But the man holding me . . . he missed nothing.
“There are parts of my life that you don’t know,” Lucas continued, “but there are parts of yours I haven’t begun to understand.”
I shook my head slowly, subtly. “You understand more than he ever did.” I didn’t have to say Kyle’s name. Lucas knew who I was talking about. “I used to love singing.”
When I didn’t offer anything else, he asked, “Not anymore?”
“I want to. I’m trying to—I’ve been trying to. I’ve sung a lot more for the fun of it in this last year than I had in the five years before. But most of the time I feel like I don’t know how to just sing.”
His dark eyes searched mine for a few seconds before he nodded. “The night I was shot . . . a lot of people died and a lot of people lived. I’m just lucky that when it all ended, I was one of the latter.”
I thought over his vague response as confusion flooded me. “Were you in the military?”
He laughed softly, but something in the tone changed at the end. The sound made me feel cold even though it was warm and humid outside. “No to the military. You see who I am now, Briar? Who I am here with you?”
I hesitated for only a second before nodding.
“You saw who I was when you came here?”
Another nod.
“I wasn’t born into this. I had to fight to get into this. I had a rough life before I met William. The night I was shot was a live-or-die shootout within my family.” When I looked up at him in horror, he dipped his head closer. “Not what you expected from your devil? It was a necessity for William to take me on.”
This man wasn’t just cloaked in darkness; he was darkness. I had feared him and that darkness, but I had never thought of him as dangerous. Panic slithered through me at his menacing tone, but I didn’t shy away. Because even though the fear was there, I couldn’t connect it to the man in front of me.
“You . . . did you kill someone?”
He released me and rolled so he was on his back and staring at the top of the canopy, but not before I saw his eyes. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”
I knew from his steady words he wasn’t lying, but I also knew in the heaviness of his tone and the pain that flashed through his eyes he hated himself for what he’d done.
And it was then that I knew I had been right: I didn’t know this man at all. Because that look and that weight pressing on him wasn’t the devil who’d bought me, or the Lucas who’d broken rules for me. He was someone else entirely.
I sat up so I was sitting cross-legged on the bed and forced myself to remain calm when I asked, “Why?”
As if he didn’t realize he was doing it, his right hand passed across his left forearm a few times, just over the large, swirling tattoo. “It’s easier to explain why I’ve killed people than it is to explain why I tried to break you, but that doesn’t mean I can explain it to you.”
“Lucas, I’ve given my body and heart to you, and you just told me you’ve killed people—including members of your family.” I took a steadying breath when my voice took on a frantic edge and swallowed roughly before continuing. “You need to give me something.”
He reached out for me, but he paused when I flinched. “I won’t ever hurt you again.” His hand stayed suspended between us for long, torturous moments before it fell to his stomach, and he looked at the canopy again. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice, Briar,” he said in a soft, haunted voice. “As for the family . . . like I said, it was a live-or-die situation, and my brother technically shot first.”
I stared down at him as shock and confusion flooded and overwhelmed me. I didn’t understand how he could talk about these things so calmly. I didn’t understand how they could be true at all and wanted them not to be.
“How could a family enter into a shootout in the first place?”