“Oh really.” She doesn’t say it as a question, but as a challenge.
“Really.”
“Let me paint a little picture for you, a timeline, so maybe you can get it through that thick skull of yours as to why I’m so confused.”
Oh, here we go.
“You save me from Mickey, we fall in love, you help me in every possible way, and tell me I’m the love of your life,” she speaks so defiantly, so strongly that it’s clear she’s not trying to convince herself that what happened between us wasn’t real. She knows it was.
And that strength of hers… Fuck, it’s one of the reasons I love her so goddamn much. She’s not going to let the hurt she feels taint the memories.
“And then, you arrive at The Underground, after telling me not to worry, on the night of the fight that would keep Mickey from takingAshes, from hurting you, and that would wipe out my debt, and you tell me I’mnothing. That it was all a lie?” She chuckles, raising her eyebrows and a smirk on her lips that’s making me crave a taste of her. I bite my lip unconsciously and when her smirk widens, I realize she fucking saw it. There’s that bratty twinkle in her eye now. “Nah, I don’t buy it. Not for a second.”
“Roxie…”
“No.” The one word rings through the back room so loudly that it sucks the air from my lungs almost.
“Roxanne,” I try again, but me calling her by her full name makes it worse. Just like I knew it would.
“Don’t you fucking try, Terecino. Be honest.Now.”
I cringe, cowering just a little. I try to prevent my shoulders from curling in. Why am I so fucking nervous around this little five foot something, intimidatingly beautiful, woman? I’m Ty Hernandez for fuck’s sake. The Destroyer. But then I look at her brown eyes and my heart skips a few beats.
I know exactly why.
And I’m exactly where I want to be.
“Roxie,” I say softly, begging her with my eyes to not make me say it. To try and protect from this, from me, as much as I can. “Please, don’t do this.”
Roxie’s silent as she stares at me, her eyes narrowing while her head tilts. She’s trying to read between what I’m saying and not saying. As if my body language alone will scream, “I killed the man who raped, abused and tortured you! In order to save us both, I had to reach out to my cartel uncle and be his fucking hitman for six tortuous weeks in order to pay him off to cover for us! I’ve killed at least six people by now, I definitely put more than that in the hospital, and the worst part is, I cancompartmentalize it! I can rationalize it and I… I don’t regret it. Because it kept you safe.”
Fuck.
“What did you do?” she asks softly in tone, but not in bite.
“What I had to.”
“For whom?”
My eyebrows push together because that… That wasn’t what I expected from her. ‘What did you have to do? Why did you have to?’ Not…
“For us.”
Her arms drop to her sides and I watch as her knuckles whiten as she clenches her hands into fists.
“I thought we were done with that. This sacrificial bullsh?—”
I cut her off, stepping forward aggressively. “That’s what we do, Roxie. I protect you and you protect me.That’s whatwe do.”
Her lip curls up in a sneer. “You son of a bitch.”
“Call me what you want,amor, I did what I had to. Just. Like. You.” I punctuate each word aggressively. “You can’t be sitting up there on your high horse when I haven’t forgotten you did the exact same thing.”
“But I did itforus, you did it to break us apart,” she snaps back.
“You don’t know the stakes, Westin.”
“So tell me,Hernandez.” She spits out my last name in a way that’s meant to be mean but just comes out as teasing. I take a deep breath and grind my molars in frustration.
