“He wasn’t dirty.”
“He wasn’t dirty,” Rook says, voice low with fury. “He was doing what we’re doing now. Protecting you.”
My breath stutters. There. There it is.
That’s all I fucking wanted.
I wanted him to say it out loud. I wanted someone other than me to say it out loud, because then it would really be real. Truth. Blind fucking truth that no one else can deny. Something in my ribs loosens so fast it almost hurts. I exhale shakily. “You don’t get to pull me out of bed in the middle of the night and call me ‘my disobedience’ and slide me into your world and fit a crown on my head,” I murmur. “You don’t get to tell me you’re mine and I’m yours and that I belong to all of you and I don’t ever have to run again… and then put me on the other side of the glass when it counts. That’s not how this works, Rook.”
That’s the deepest truth, and both of us know it. He stares at me like he wants to devour me. “I want him dead,” I whisper.
“I know,” he says.
“Thenlet mekill him,” I plead.
Something dark and hungry flashes through his gaze at that. “You want to pull the trigger yourself, and watch while it happens? You want the last thing he sees to be you?”
My voice is steady, surprising me. “Yes.”
Rook leans forward. His hands leave the desk and come to my hips in one smooth, decisive motion. He drags me in between his knees like I weigh nothing, like there isn’t a part of me that still remembers being thrown and pinned and trapped by bigger hands. He looks up at me from that position, and it goes straight to somewhere low in me I’m pretending isn’t there.
“Listen to me,” he says, quiet and intense, thumb pressing into the sharp point of my hip bone. “When you end him, I’ll will be in the room. When you end him, you will be the last thing in his world that he sees. When you end him, it will be because you told me it was time. Not because he finished being useful to me.”
I blink.
“When I end him,” I echo dumbly.
He smiles, slow and devastating.
“Do you honestly think I would ever give that man a future?” he asks softly.
Heat licks down my spine at that. The way he says it. The possessive certainty. The promise curled in it like a brand.
“I thought you were stalling,” I admit, voice small.
“I am stalling,” he murmurs. “But, only a little. I’m stalling because I want as much as I can get out of him. I don’t care abouthim. I care about walking you through London and someone taking a shot at your head because I left a loose end.”
Something in me unclenches.Oh.
“I’m not asking you to wait forever,” he says. “I’m asking you to give me until tonight.”
My stomach flips. “Tonight,” I repeat.
His eyes stay on mine. “Tonight.”
“So we end him tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Promise,” I whisper.
His grip tightens at my hips. His voice drops into something sinful. “Yes, my disobedience. I promise you his last breath.”
Something molten floods me. It’s not pretty, or soft. It’s violent and grateful and starving. I don’t know what my face does, but his eyes go almost feral when he sees it. “Rook,” I whisper.
He looks like he’s about to lift me onto his lap and make good on every filthy promise he’s been holding back since the night in the townhouse. Like he’s about to ruin the argument and me along with it.
Which is when the door bangs open.Of fucking course.
