“Luna.”
There was an unspoken command in his tone, but I just shook my head again.
“When Gino came here looking for you the other day, he walked in a way that led me to believe he had an injury in an…inconvenient place. And I want to know if it was you who gave him that injury.”
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I couldn’t read him, and I sure as hell had no clue how he would react if I told him the truth.
“I need to know, Luna.”
I met his stare with a mutinous one of my own. “Why? What does it matter?”
It was his turn to get caught off guard, and it took him a minute to respond. “I don’t know. But it does.” He paused. “Please. Tell me.”
Though his expression remained unreadable, there was something in his tone. Vulnerability, maybe? And before I knew what was happening, my mouth opened and the words poured out of me before I could stop them. “He came into my room, and he was drunk, and he had a gun in his hand. I thought he was going to shoot me. Or himself. Or maybe both of us. So I distracted him the best way I knew how. I gave him a blow job to buy myself some time.”
If my admission bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. “And why did you bite him?”
“Because…because he put the gun to my temple, and I didn’t know what else to do. So I bit him hard enough to draw blood, and then I climbed out the window and I ran.”
The muscles of his jaw moved, like he was clenching his teeth.
Shoving the horror of that night deep down into my nightmares where it belonged, I dropped my arms and walked up to the bars, wrapping my hands around them and pushing out my breasts. “Would you like me to do that to you? Would you like to feel my mouth around your cock, Tristan?”
A spark of hunger flickered in his eyes, but it was quickly followed by a flash of anger. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m just asking.” I ran my tongue along my lower lip, wetting it.
His eyes flicked down to my mouth and then came back to mine. “Don’t,” he repeated. “You don’t have to play the whore for me.”
“Isn’t that why I’m here? So you can handcuff me to the bars and molest me whenever you feel like it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here so I can keep you?—”
“Safe,” I finished for him. “Except there’s only one problem with that answer.”
“What problem is that?”
“I’m not yours to protect.”
He drew back at that. Not physically. Physically, he didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even blink an eye. But I felt it, the way he pulled away as he took in my response and rolled it around, trying to decide how it made him feel, and deciding he didn’t like it.
We stared at each other for a long time.
It was me who broke the silence. “Look, I understand why you did what you did. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, even if I don’t agree with the way it was carried out. But you can just let me go now, Tristan. I can go to my brother’s. Or I can get him and the two of us can go somewhere else. Start a new life.”
“Gino won’t let you go that easily. He would hunt you down and he would find you.”
“I know how to make myself disappear. He wouldn’t find us.” I leaned into the bars and used his own word against him. “Please. You can just let me go.”
His voice was strained, pain and confusion thickening his tongue and darkening his eyes when he said, “No. Ican’t.”
What little hope I had drained out of me, and I was suddenly exhausted. Because, at that moment, I knew I wasn’t leaving this place. I was stuck here in this damn cell, and who knew if I’d ever see the sun again. Or my brother’s handsome face.
And that last thought was what broke me. Hot tears filled my eyes and spilled onto my cheeks, and I turned away. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I couldn’t stop the wrenching sobs that burned my throat and made my chest ache. My life may not have been the greatest life, but it was better than being locked away when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
