Every filthy thought.
He doesn’t mean it.
When I thought of Mateo fucking me, he was above me, a taller shadow than every demon I carried, chasing them away with the jagged edges I’d come to crave. The gentle touch that belied every punched-out hole in his bedroom wall.
Even in my fantasies, he was my protector.
Could I be that for him?
What if I couldn’t?
Then you’d still be enough. He’s told you a thousand times.
I’d told myself a thousand times too, but some days I was too fucked up to hear it, and today—tonight—was fast becoming too multifaceted to call. A few hours ago, I’d been coming on Mateo’s chest. Now he was telling meyou can fuck me on the beach if you wantas we drove headfirst into a battle royale with a clan of hostile bikers who’d at one time or other tried to kill us both.
It was too much. The best and worst book I’d ever read, but I couldn’t put it down.
Mateo eased the HGV onto a quiet B-road. Up ahead, the lights of an industrial estate glowed in the fading dark, growing brighter as we neared the delivery point for the second and third lorries in the convoy.
Nash and Rubi pulled over, letting them pass. With our numbers split, it was the ideal time to attack. We were sitting ducks, and I didn’t remember agreeing to this part of the plan.
I remembered Alexei’s theory, though. Borrowed words from the only book I’d ever convinced Mateo to read from cover to cover.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
I’d had the second part down my whole fucking life. But what was it to be strong? As the air tensed with imminent violence and my body tensed for action, it wasn’t my coiled muscles or clenched fists that made me feel invincible.
It was him.
It hadalwaysbeen him.
I bent over, reaching for a hammer and a crowbar. He was staring right at me when I straightened, in the path of an incoming storm and not giving a single shit about himself—about anything or anyone that wasn’t me.
Certainty surged in my heart. I found a smile in the pit of the anger I’d need to survive this fight. A smile that I felt from the tips of my toes to my scalp. I held out the hammer, our fingers brushing as he closed his fingers around the brutal metal.
“Mateo?”
He turned his head fully, neither of us watching the road. The empty fields beside it. The dark undergrowth. “Yeah?”
“I don’t want to fuck you,” I whispered. “The first time it happens, I wantyouto fuckme.”
Silence filled the cab, loaded and heady. Mateo’s gaze sizzled, burning me up inside, and it was so easy to get lost in those amber orbs. To count the flecks of gold as my blood thrummed in my ears, thundering in time with my heartbeat.
Mateo’s fingers slid over the hammer, covering mine. His full lips parted.
A breath.
A whisper.
A brick that burst through the windscreen and smashed into his face.
15
MATEO
The brick collided with my skull, the impact bulldozing my entire face, brow bone to chin, slamming my head against the back of the seat.
Oof.Sickening pain flared, dizzying and instant. Then blood, viscous and red, clouding my vision enough that Embry surging forward and through the space left by the shattered windscreen felt too surreal to be true.
