I see black and before I can stop myself, I stride forward, rear back, and strike him. Hard.
My open palm connects brutally with his mouth and a sharp crack of flesh meeting flesh echoes through the room.
I stumble back, bringing my stinging hand up to my lips, unconsciously tracing the pattern of where I just struck him. Dazedly, I watch as a bright bloom of red wells up on his lower lip and I can only watch, helpless, as that bead grows and spills over, a red river flowing down his chin.
“Oh my god!” I breathe, terrified at what I’ve just done. I’ve never laid my hands on another person in anger. I just proved everything he said about me and my family to be true. A tremor claws up my spine, into my lungs, and churns in my belly. “Wraith- I- oh god.” I bite down hard on my finger to stop the tears pricking the backs of my eyes. I have no right to cry. “I’m so sorry. I- fuck. God. I…”
He stands there, nostrils flaring, and when I reach out with that same finger I’ve just bitten, to wipe the blood away from his fiery skin, he’s still as a statue. His eyes though. God, those eyes. Eyes that aren’t just deep pools of sparking, burningire. Eyes that are filled with sorrow over what he was just forced to witness—his brother being savagely beaten by my family for something he didn’t do, his blood spilled, red, running like rivers over his broken flesh. Those orbs look at me like they looked at me that morning, which feels like centuries ago, that I saw those crisscrossing white lines on his back. All the sorrow and rage, horror and fear, mingle together to become one sensation. Pain.
It hurts my heart to see that raw, undiluted sadness scorching his eyes. Scorching my soul.
“I don’t want to be your destruction,” I whimper, his blood smeared over my fingers, rich and coppery, the air charged with tension between us, a storm brewing, about to obliterate us both with its intensity. “I want to be your salvation, and you, mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he groans. “Why did you not tell me you’d never… I wouldn’t have used you like that. Taken you like a fucking animal. I would have controlled myself. Gone slow for you.”
He reaches out and brutally wraps his hand in my unbound hair. He twists the long strands over his fingers and tugs back, exposing my throat to him. His eyes gleam when he looks at me that way, my jugular, my life force, everything I am, bared and on offer.
I return his burning stare, one soul looking straight at another, two opposing forces crashing together, mingling in a brutal, wondrous dance that is beyond my meager understanding.
“I wanted you to,” I hiss. “To take me. To be rough. I wanted you because you’re the only one who could ease that ache inside of me. I didn’t understand it until you’d already done it,but I knew that I didn’t want you to stop. I wanted you to drive it away. Everything. You didn’t do anything wrong. You were you, Wraith, and that’s what I wanted. I need you. And I want you to need me too. I want to be yours.”
The storm threatening, brewing between us, finally breaks over us with all the force of its gale-force winds, the wrath of a vengeful, unseen force sent to scour the earth, to break and sunder and make new again out of the old.
Wraith tilts my face back brutally, while his other hand sweeps up to cup my cheek and jaw possessively, to hold me in place when he slams his mouth to mine in a kiss so violent, so hot and terrifyingly possessive that it leaves no doubt in my mind that I amhis.
Chapter 17
Wraith
Redemption. That’s what kissing her feels like, having her in my arms. She’s not sorry for what I did to her earlier. She doesn’t see me as the bastard who stole something precious from her.
I spent all morning watching my brother, an innocent man, be punished for something he didn’t do. I spent the entire time while Gage’s blood was spilled and his screams rent the air, trying to think how I could possibly beg her forgiveness for the harsh way I treated her. The guilt ate at me right along with the rage and the sorrow of old memories, rearing their ugly heads and sinking their teeth into flesh that I thought had toughened over the years.
While Gage took that beating, I felt it should have been me.
I was the one who hurt Leena.
I was the one who wronged her.
I was no better than the demons from my past.
I knew I could never atone for my sins, but I never accounted for Leena. For the way she’d look at me, for how fearlessly she’d fight for me, pull me from the swirling black sea I was drowning in, had always been drowning in. How she’d wrap around my aching soul and heal the wounds that lie gaping on its surface.
When she pulls away, Leena’s panting. I drop my gaze to her heaving chest, her tight, perky tits straining under the sundress she has on. It’s too bad she paired it with leggings, even though it’s short as hell. Or wore panties. Too bad, because I would have liked to sneak a peek at her, swollen and glistening for me already.
I give my head a fucking shake. There is no way I can do this with her again. No fucking way I can lose control like I did this morning, and with my nerves shredded as they are at the moment, what I need to do is get in a frigid shower, beat my dick into submission, and go for a long run to release the pent-up adrenaline buzzing through my veins. The last thing I want to do is hurt her.
“I… this morning… Leena…” Fuck. It would help if I could get a coherent thought together. “I think we should give it some time. I mean, you’re probably sore. I wasn’t gentle.”
“I already said I didn’t want you to be. You gave me what we both needed.”
Fuck. She was so fucking right about that.
“I wouldn’t have chosen that for you, if I had known.”
She blinks, her eyes shining with pain I don’t want to see there. “I didn’t want candles and flowers and boxes of chocolates, if that’s what you mean.”
I clench my jaw so hard that it ticks between us like a damn bomb. I screw my eyes shut. She doesn’t know. She can’t know why I feel the way I do because I haven’t told her. Because I don’t want to tell her. To put that shit between us. I’ve never told a soul in my life about that shit. If I did, she’d probablynever want to have sex with me again. She’d probably demand a goddamn divorce.
