“Wait, what? Achilles,no.”
“Yes.” He stopped in front of an Emilia Spencer painting on my wall, his mere tone giving me frostbite.
“But I thought—I mean, I—I…”
WhatdidI think? That he’d defy his father to marry me? That he’d forgive me after what I’d done to him? Of course he handed me over to be someone else’s headache.
“You didn’t really think I’d risk the don title by marrying some lowly Irish slut, did you?” His brow crumpled in mock confusion, a sly grin twisting one corner of his mouth. “I thought we knew each other better than that.”
His words were more painful than fists. Deadlier than bullets. They would leave scars that were beyond skin-deep.
“Oh.” Achilles tsked, tilting his head sideways. “That’s too bad.”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move a muscle in my entire useless body.
“Don’t do this,” I warned, voice quivering.
“Already did.” He was halfway out the door.
His back was the last thing I saw before I fell to my knees and let a raw shriek burst from my throat.
He finally did what he promised he would all those years ago.
He destroyed me.
Chapter Seven
Achilles
I needed to get fucked.
Urgently. Immediately. Indefinitely.
Not in the biblical sense. I couldn’t touch another woman. Never really could. Not that I was a virgin by any stretch of the imagination. But I screwed women rarely, and always from behind, so they wouldn’t get a front-row seat to the mess that was my face. Nobody deserved to see that. Hell, my own mother recoiled whenever we were in the same room.
Sometimes, I’d pretend to have a mistress. A regular hookup. Spread the word around. See if Tierney cared.
She never did.
She’d let that information slide off her shoulders as if nothing happened.
Fuck her and fuck her and fuck her.
Fuuuuuuuck.
She was so fucking beautiful.
So much I always held my breath the first few seconds when I came face-to-face with her.
Ah, shit. My head was a mess.
It was midmorning, hardly a good time for a stiff drink, but how did that saying go? The heart wants what it wants.
Mine wanted to go into cardiac arrest from alcohol poisoning.
My vision was blurry as I exited her apartment building and took the stairs down, charging to my black Ducati. I hadn’t stopped shaking since that meeting with Sangue Blu. That was two days ago. I had to drink myself into a near coma before I showed up on her doorstep today to deliver the news. And guess what? I was going back to doing exactly that.
I mounted my bike and pushed on my helmet, flipping the kill switch. The beast roared to life beneath me. My pulse hammered against the side of my throat the entire ride from Hunts Point into Manhattan.
