I kiss her again.
Deeper this time. Hotter.
My hand slides into her hair, anchoring her gently. Her fingers clutch my cut like she wants me close and doesn’t know how to ask for it yet.
I drag my mouth to the corner of hers, breathing hard.
“Tell me to stop,” I say, voice low. “You want me to stop, you say it, and I stop.”
Ruby’s lashes flutter. She gives the smallest shake of her head.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she whispers.
Chapter 6
Ruby
Thecabiniswarmin a way the safe house never was. The air between us is tight, charged, and I can hear my own heartbeat like it’s a second voice in the room.
I force a breath in. “I meant it,” I whisper.
His eyes flick to my mouth, then back to my eyes, like he refuses to let me hide behind heat.
“You’ve been through hell,” he says, voice rough. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I’m not paying you,” I say, and my voice shakes anyway. “I’m choosing you.”
His jaw flexes hard. He looks away for half a second, like he’s trying to drag himself back behind a line.
I reach down and slip my shoes off, setting them by the door like it’s a normal thing to do, like my hands aren’t trembling. Sindoes the same, toeing his boots off with a quiet scrape on the wood.
The sound grounds me.
For a breath, we just stand there, too close, too aware.
Sin’s voice drops, stripped of its hard edges. “I need you to understand something.”
My throat tightens. “Okay.”
“I grew up in foster homes,” he says, like he’s stating a fact that never deserved to hurt but did anyway. “You learn early what people take. You learn how fast kindness turns into a hook.”
My chest aches. I don’t speak. I don’t move.
He keeps going, eyes on the floor like he’s pulling this out of somewhere he keeps buried. “I thought I loved someone once. I met her while I was working for her dad at a junkyard. I believed in it. Believed in her.”
His fingers flex once at his side.
“I enlisted,” he says, voice tight. “Wanted to do something that mattered. Wanted to be more than what the foster system handed me. She told me she couldn’t wait. Married someone else three months later.”
The words land heavy in the room between us.
Sin lifts his gaze to mine, and the intensity there makes my skin prickle.
“So I stopped,” he says. “Stopped wanting. Stopped trusting. Stopped believing it was worth it.”
My heart pounds.
“And then you looked at me in that room,” he murmurs, “and it felt like something inside me snapped awake.”
