It may be toxic or fucked up, unhealthy beyond measure, but Kane is the first and only person I’ve ever chosen. There’s no one else who’s safe for me. When he was pretending to be Asher, I never felt safe, but when he was an angry, anonymous stalker, I did.
Tilting his head without opening his eyes, he pulls the hoodie away, uncovering the red marks from his healing skin that has been stitched together to form a rounded edge. I hug him tighter as I ask, “Does it hurt?”
He slowly shakes his head as I wrap my legs around him, so my calves are between his spread legs. My fucked up right leg is there with his left arm. It’s not the same because I still have the limb, but I kiss his neck to get him to open his eyes.
“I thought I was going to lose my leg,” I whisper as he massages down my thigh. “It’s the most pain I’ve ever been in. Lenny?—”
“Where the fuck was he?” Kane snaps his eyes open, full of rage.
“Kane, he’s you. You don’t understand the things he’s done to protect us, but this world is all he knows, so he’s stuck too while trying to protect as many people as possible.” He’s about to argue with me but I can’t allow Lennox to be hated for something that’s not his fault. “Lenny is all I had. He was there when Luna was born, he was there every time Helene would punish me. He took them for me.” My tears burn a hot path down my cheeks at the reminder of the blank look in Lennox’s eyes when he would go to the basement. I shouldn’t have followed him, but I was curious. “Don’t hate him when he doesn’t have anyone. He tried to find you after Rowan gave an order for you to be killed.”
I hug him tighter as I cry despite the way he turns rigid. Staring through the window, he runs his tongue on the back of his teeth before stiffly saying, “You’re talking like you love him.”
“I do. I’ve never had an uncle before, and he was kind to me. He told me to run away, came up with the plans himself, but I knew if I did, you wouldn’t be able to find me.”
“You love him like an uncle?” His voice changes to the bitter one he uses when I catch him talking to himself.
I nod. “They have the woman he loves, and they had you, so we understood each other. He took photos of my bump growing to show you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Lenny was going to record the birth if you didn’t come back in time, so you didn’t miss anything. But I got sick, and she was too small.”
His heart slows as he asks, “Did you pick the name together?”
“No. I picked it when I saw her. The day they told us you were dead was the quietest he’d ever been. He sat on the roof for days, grieving you.”
It marked the change because he kept telling me to run after that. But it’s a lie, all of it is a lie. My baby isn’t though, and I carefully demand, “I’m going with you when you kill Helene.” Twisting to straddle his thighs, I hold his left elbow, lifting his arm higher to press my lips above the healing incisions.
81
KANE
Iwait for her to see me the same way I do myself. Not the stitches or how my skin is still raw, but truly see the shit I’ve done. The older scars running over the inside of my elbow are overshadowed by not having the lower portion of my arm, so she doesn’t notice them. She doesn’t see that my ruin isn’t due to my arm; it’s deeper. DNA deep. I can’t remove Helene and Rowan’s scheming, their biology, or what I’ve done to be like them.
Yet she’s not disgusted. Instead of recoiling, she presses her lips to the inked patch of my forearm above the red stump. “I can be your left hand until it’s healed.”
“I fucking love you.” I laugh weakly as I pull her closer. After three fucking years of hell, I get to kiss my wife. “I love you. Do you hear me?”
She moans into me, grinding down on my unworking dick. The cold and stench are clinging to me, so I push my stump between her legs as I mumble against her lips, “Ride my arm before I stretch you open with it.”
She stills.
I close my eyes, waiting for her to say I’ve gone too far. Only her voice is light as she softly kisses my cheek. “Heal first. I don’t want it to hurt you.”
Flipping her onto her back, I rest my elbow above her head. “You’d let me?”
“You have to ask, when you put my head inside a dead body?”
“You loved it.” I bite her bottom lip. “I might do it again when we kill the bitch.”
“You are not putting me in that sadistic fucking cunt,” my wife grits, pushing against my shoulders.
“I was thinking of going through her stomach.” I shrug.
Fuck me, I forgot how much my heart soars at the sound of her laugh. Yet my dick doesn’t even twitch as I kiss a path down her body until I’m kneeling on the floor between her feet. Then softly flick her t-shirt. “Take this off.”
She lifts up to pull it over her head as I press my lips to the scarring on her calf. She gently traces the marks she left on my shoulder, so I ask, “Do you want to hurt me for everything I’ve done to you?”
