I’m no expert, but I thought destruction would feel far worse than this…
Shouldn’t it?
Rather than burn in hellfire for all eternity, we wind up lying on the black mat, dripping sweat. Our bodies dominate opposite ends, not touching but still too close. Close enough to sense his breathing slow and hear how his teeth click together when he can’t stay silent anymore.
“You stood at that railing for well over half an hour.” His tone is softer, either from exhaustion or pity. Gone is the raspy hum—he’s serious. “I watched you.”
That statement sends a quiver through my belly.
I shift, crossing my arms over my chest. “How do you—”
“I wasn’t going to let you jump.” He laughs darkly, shaking his head. “Why do it anyway? Did you want to feel it? Falling? Crashing? The pain?”
He rolls to face me. Both of his legs unfold before him, nearly twice the length of mine. He’s so big in such an enclosed space. Too big to jump off a bridge unnoticed. I’d barely make a splash, but he’d make waves falling from that height.
“Did you? Why else were you there?” I don’t look at him as I pose the question. So many stains, mysterious and dark, speckle the gray concrete floor around the mat. Blood? Sweat? Spit? The material doesn’t reveal any answers when I swipe my palm against it. Just cold, hard silence.
“Maybe,” he says finally. He sounds heavy when he’s being honest—a weird thing to notice after knowing someone for barely an hour. He’s cyclic, spitting out truth and lies in an almost predictable rhythm. His lies are soft and empty, but the truth lands like a sucker punch.
And the sting makes me feel something. Even if it’s pain.
“I’ll tell you what, though. If I were going to off myself, I wouldn’t want to fucking feel it,” he says. He lifts his arm above him, eyeing the tattoos painting his skin from wrist to shoulder. “I’d go numb. Get high, so I wouldn’t have to feel shit. Not the guilt or regret…”
He trails off, but the confession isn’t for me. In a way, he’s speaking for both of us, deploying a rare, potent drug. Honesty. My veins hum, gobbling it up, sending it straight through my heart. I’m not addicted, but it’s only a matter of time.
I might be just as susceptible to vices as Hale. We shared a mother, after all.
“My...brother. He was the best person you could ever meet. I mean it,” I hear myself confess, but I don’t really register saying the words. More than anything else, it’s like my thoughts are spilling out into the open—all those dirty things I’d never say to anyone else. “But then he changed. Hale knew something. Something bad. He wanted to tell. He tried to tell me, I think…”
But I was too selfish to listen. Father isn’t the savior he pretends to be, Hale ranted to me once. What’s really going on? It’s bad, Frey. It’s bad.
Not long after, he ended up dead.
Daze should react just like everyone else. Roll his eyes and tell me I’m foolish. Dramatic. Paranoid.
I’ve heard it all before.
“That fucking sucks, Blondie,” he bellows on a sigh, so heavy. So real. He’s not joking now. Instead, he kicks his heels against the floor, sending up tiny waves of dust. “That fucking sucks...”
“So, what now?” I gesture between us with a trembling hand. “Do we hold hands? Pray? Do you cut and run?”
I insisted Colton do the first two options when he made us kiss.
“I could,” he says, nodding. Sweat glues his hair to his shoulders, and I lose track of the conversation the longer I stare. God, the man is a canvas of tattoos. In addition to the artwork on his back, his chest is a collage of skulls and letters. Names.
“Samuel,” I read, too curious to keep from reaching out to finger the name written on the center of his chest, right over his heart. “Someone I should know about?”
He brushes my hand aside. “Don’t tell me you’re the one wanting to cut and run. Don’t go hunting for shit to get upset over.” He sighs and rolls onto his back, eyeing the ceiling. “You want to leave—you leave. You want to stay—you stay.”
Hunting. Is that what I’m doing? I eye my outstretched fingers and curl them one by one into a fist. Then I shift to copy him, lying on my back.
I don’t know how long we lie like this.
Too long.
My eyes are fluttering open when I regain my senses again. Alarm slams into me, making me scramble upright. Did I fall asleep?
I did…and he’s still sleeping. God, it’s so unfair for someone so abrasive to be so beautiful. Ignore the sweat and grime, and his body could be an exhibit in some weird art gallery focusing on tattoos. I start to touch one—an intricate design spanning his hip—only to stop myself halfway. My finger trembles inches from his skin before I finally force myself to bridge the gap and touch him.
I’m already too far gone to start using my common sense now. Rock meet bottom.
I trace the design with the tip of my nail, following the curves up and around to the flat of his stomach. Then down, grazing his pelvis. It isn’t long before I realize that he isn’t sleeping anymore—at least, one part of his anatomy is very much awake. He’s so big. Thick. I try to ignore it, teasing his skin like a game of hide and seek. The longer I explore, the easier it is to escape logic, panic, and the ache between my legs demanding I remember what he felt like inside me.
I switch to another tattoo over his ribcage, but as I crest the ridge of his chest, I notice that a pair of gray eyes are intently watching my every move. The moment our gazes connect, he grabs my wrist, pulling my hand away.
“Damn, girl,” he says thickly.
It’s strange how those two words convey more than most people I know can say in a million meaningless sentences. Damn, it’s early. Damn, I’m tired. Damn…you’re pushing me too far.
He tugs until I settle down beside him. “It sounds like the world’s ending out there.”
“Huh?”
He inclines his head to the nearest wall. “Listen.”
I strain my ears and catch the hint of police sirens and wailing firetrucks. Strange. I’d been so wrapped up in his body that I didn’t even notice.
“It’s probably an accident,” Daze says. He still has my wrist in his grasp, and lifts it, observing my fingers and the thin bones in my wrist. “Either that or you got way more attention than you bargained for, Princess. Your rich father probably sent out the swat team, looking for you.”
I swallow hard, alarmed by how accurately he has me pinned down just from a few snippets of information. I watched you, he said, referring to how long I stood at the bridge. But what if he meant longer?
No. I shake my head, pushing the thoughts away. I’m being paranoid.
“Maybe he did,” I admit to him out loud. “But his perfect daughter being found in a place like this would bring the wrong kind of attention. It would play better to his optics if he could say I was kidnapped, missing, or dead.”
I mean it to come across as a joke. A morbid one, maybe.
Daze stiffens and releases my wrist. Then he turns away so I can’t see his face. “You hate him that much?” he wonders, and I can sense the disgust in his tone. “I’ve been a pity fuck before, but never a revenge fuck.”
I watch the muscles in his back ripple in time with his breathing. Then I prod one with the tip of my thumb and marvel at the firmness. The heat. How he doesn’t cringe away from me like he should.
“Don’t go hunting,” I scold him softly.
“You’re right.” He grabs my wrist again, evoking a shiver that I feel all the way down to my toes. “I doubt much about you could turn me off, anyway.” His eyes flicker down my torso.
“Oh really?” I counter thickly. Any anger my voice might contain vanishes the longer I watch his larger fingers intertwine with mine. “Are you that big and bad? Father could be a mob boss for all you know.”
“I do know,” he says smugly. “Every mobster in the goddamn city, in fact. None of them has a daughter that looks like you.”
He could be lying, but a part of me warns he isn’t. For a brief moment, I toy with the idea of telling him the truth. Father is Michael Heywood, leader of Covenant and holy savior of the entire city.
“Is that why you stopped me?” I ask him instead. “Because I’m ‘not your type’?”
“No…” He lets me go, and his hand falls to the mat with a heavy thud. “I almost killed someone last night.”
I feel my entire body tense. Again, he could be lying, but something in his voice makes me doubt that. He sounds so damn tired. Empty.
So, I whisper, “Tell me.”
His gaze darts to mine as if he’s remembering I’m even here. Then he reaches out, and I inhale as his thumb finds my chin, stroking just below my lower lip. “I mean it. Fuck… I wanted to beat the shit out of him. I wanted him dead.”
“Why?” I counter, so soft I barely hear my voice slithering beneath his.
“Because… I could have stopped him,” he says without elaborating. “I could have. But then I’d be right back in the fucking thick of it, and I’ve fought too damn hard to get out the first time. I don’t want to be that person again. I can’t be…” His gaze darkens as he glares beyond me into some inner universe where I can’t follow. “So, I stopped myself. I pulled back. I let him win, but it’s like the universe can’t let me fucking be a coward for once.” He blinks, and when his eyes reopen, he’s seeing me again, deploying that unnerving stare. “It’s punishing me,” he says through gritted teeth. “So, fuck it. I’m done fighting. I’m going to Hell anyway.”
“Me too,” I find myself blurting out.
He laughs. Then he sighs. “I know what we could do.” He sits upright, with his back still to me. He reaches for a pile of crumbled clothing, and I flinch as he tosses a handful of fabric to me. My clothes. “We can get dressed. The gym has a shower—” He nods to a closed door at the back of the room. “Then we can go to my shitty ass apartment and fuck again. Or talk.”
He makes both sound equally appealing.
Besides, I’m already at rock bottom, and am too tired to start climbing now.
“Fine.”