"Everything," I said. "I'll do everything."
Her breath caught. Her lips parted.
She reached for me, but I caught her wrists. Held them. Pressed them back against the couch cushion on either side of her head as I bent over her.
"You don't understand, little bird." My voice was like gravel. "I don't do gentle. I don't do sweet. If I start, I won't stop. I'll take everything you have and then I'll take more." I paused, tracing the delicate bones of her face and chest with my eyes. "I'll break your wings," I whispered.
"Flying is overrated." Her voice was steady, but her pulse raced beneath my thumbs. "So shut up and kiss me."
There was nothing else for me to do. I couldn't resist her on my own. And when the time came that she hated me, I would remind her that I tried to warn her.
I released her wrists and fisted her hair instead, dragging her head back, crushing my mouth to hers. She moaned and arched her body toward me, her hands clawing at my shirt, yanking it free of my jeans.
This was a mistake. A disaster. The beginning of something that would destroy us both.
Yet…I didn't care.
I kissed her like I was starving. Like she was oxygen and I'd been drowning for years.
And when I finally pulled back, both of us shaking with the power of it, her hands gripped in my shirt, I knew there was no going back.
Even as I stormed out of her apartment, ordering her to lock the door behind me. Even as I understood that I'd just confirmed our death sentences…
I knew.
CHAPTER 9
RAVEN
Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7, third movement.Precipitato.
I hammered it into the empty restaurant forty minutes before my shift, the dissonant chords crashing off the walls like fists through plate glass. The piece was violent. Percussive. A thing with teeth—designed to rattle the fillings out of anyone unlucky enough to be listening.
It matched my mood.
The waitstaff had stopped setting tables, making the restaurant strangely quiet as I used the time to warm up before customers arrived. I could feel their stillness, the nervous pause of people who didn't know whether to applaud or call someone.
But I didn't care about them.
I cared about the man who thought I couldn't feel him standing near the service entrance.
He'd arrived before me, even though I was early tonight, and positioned himself where the kitchen noise would mask hisbreathing, where the angle of the wall would block any draft his body displaced.
Smart. He was starting to catch on.
But he'd forgotten about the floor.
The Silver Table's marble transmitted vibration like a tuning fork. Every footstep, every shift of weight, traveled through the stone and into the piano's legs and up through the bench and into my bones. I'd learned to read this floor the way seismologists read fault lines.
And Milo was a goddamn earthquake to my sensitive receptors.
I crashed into the final chord and held it, letting the dissonance ring until the strings went dead. Then I lifted my hands and placed them in my lap.
Silence.
Then a barely there, almost nothing, exhale from the service entrance.
Found you.
