It’s making her question her morality.
He’s proving a point—that she’s no different from her father.
He gave her choices. Moral dilemmas.
One: Turn him in and lose her career. This dishonors her attorney role, but brings justice to the families. Hailey Holden’s family received that with Dalton. But it sounds like there’s another.
Two: Do nothing and let a murderer go free. This honors her lawyer role, but allows someone who is dangerous to remain in society and around Emma, someone she cares about.
Three: Tell me and essentially pull the switch on his electric chair.
No matter what she does, she loses.
I’m guessing he’s deranged enough not to care how it pans out. He’ll feel like he won in every scenario.
Hopefully, his expert level of manipulation never occurs to her. Because her telling me is the least ethical option. Another cause to celebrate for him since he probably believes it will destroy us.
Bryce will pay for everything he did, but that won’t fix her frame of mind about the ugliness of this world. She’sexperienced the height of the perks. But she’s surely determined that even with all the things I can offer her here, the simplicities of safety and anonymity are not among them.
I don’t say any of that though. I don’t comment on what she endured or where we’ll go from here because my mind can’t seem to settle on a solution or a sentence that won’t reveal what a homicidal maniac I am. I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear about all the ways I plan to torture Bryce before I kill him. And that’s happening, no matter where we decide to land.
Instead, I keep it simple, reaching for her hand. “Let’s get cleaned up.”
She lets me guide her under the downpour of the hot shower, the steam enveloping us as I squirt a dollop of her dessert-fragrance body wash into my palm, scrubbing away the tiny speckles of blood from the guy she killed. She doesn’t say much, frozen within the ordeal she endured. But she watches me, her breath held and her eyes tracking every motion of my hands as I wash her—matted hair to her scraped feet—until she decides to do some lathering of her own, her sudsy fingers roving all over me.
Finally, those tortured brown embers land on me with a fiery revelation. “I lost my parents and became a pawn in some psycho’s sick game, all because of the life my father had chosen.”
That sounds like a fucking goodbye, a justification as to why this won’t work, why she won’t want me near Remy, why logic will snuff out anything her heart was embracing regarding me.
I can’t even completely refute it because this world is full of risks and danger and nefarious people. I’d give my life to protect them, but that’s a hard sell since I’ve missed the mark a few times now.
A savage possessiveness throttles me. What if her solution to this—to everything—is to run from me? I can’t take another daywithout her. Without Remy. I’d never allow that to happen, but I can’t even tolerate the thought of her wanting to leave me.
My lips crash into hers, a ruthless tethering that she succumbs to immediately. Both of us wild and crazed, a reckoning of this fucked-up day.Weeks. Years.I clutch her face, angling her head for better access, trailing my lips and tongue and teeth across her jaw, down the column of her throat, over her battering pulse point, and atop her dainty collarbone.
Her nails rake through my hair, along my scalp, until they land at the nape of my neck and my shoulder blade, branding me with half-moons in her effort to draw me closer.
I hoist her up to my waist, pressing her back against the tiles. Her pebbled nipples graze my chest, and I know without a doubt that she’s wet and ready for me. Her mind might be prepared to bolt, but her body can’t deny where she belongs. My cock is so painfully hard, spearing her stomach and marking her abs with my precum. Without a second of hesitation, I lift her hips and glide inside her drenched pussy, both of us moaning as we adjust to the stretch.
Her inner walls quiver around me, her breaths panting out, her heart hammering, her hips bucking for more friction. And I want to give her fucking more. Of every-goddamn-thing there is. Of anything she could possibly want.
Snaking my arm beneath her knee, I push her thigh up until it’s kissing the outside of her breast, her leg dangling off my bicep. I repeat on the other side, so she’s folded in half, my palms flattened to the dewy tiles beside her head, my cock deep inside her, my pelvis rubbing her clit as I piston my hips with the ferocity this whole fucked-up situation has provoked.
She moans with each brutal thrust, her lungs puffing out gasps, her eyes glazing over, lashes fluttering, body surrendering to everything we are. Her seductive whimpers and sounds rise around us with the billowing steam, ricocheting off the marbleand glass and bronze fixtures to cocoon us in a symphony of how damn perfect we are together.
I issue a plea, my voice raw and husky, dripping with the desperation I’ve been spiraling in since she sent that gut-wrenching text. “Don’t leave me, Merce. I won’t survive it.”
Her breath catches, and tears trickle down her cheeks. It doesn’t matter that we both know I could never let her go. We’ve been here before. I can hold her body captive, but her heart could still long to be somewhere else. I can’t bear to have her see me as a failure rather than the man that will take care of her.
“I told you I was dead inside when you were gone. I can’t do it again, baby. You and Remy are my whole world. My breath, my hope, my life. I love you so fucking much.”
She doesn’t utter a word. Her eyes are locked on mine, searing into me as if she were trying to read my soul. I’m not sure that’s the best idea. The only good she’ll find there already belongs to her. The rest is what she wants to flee from.
“Tell me you won’t try to leave me.”Pump.“Say it.”Again.“I’ll fix this.”Thrust.“I’ll get us through it.”More.“I promise.”Harder.“But you can’t fucking—”
“I won’t, Ryker.” She pants that out and purrs as I plunge into her deeper, her pupils blown, gaze momentarily distant as she claws her way back to me. “That’s not what I meant.”
I usually know everything she means, but I’m at a fucking loss. “What’s not?”
