Page 65 of King of War

I nuzzle her neck and listen to her shallow breathing while she plays with my hair. “I love you, Rayne,” I tell her, my mouth pressed against her skin.

“I love you too, Enzo.” Maybe it’s the vodka or the orgasm talking, but I’ll still take it.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

RAYNE

Dammit! I told him I love him, and while that is true, I still shouldn’t have said it. He shouldn’t have said it either, because it complicates things way too much.

Tomorrow we can pretend it was just the endorphins talking. People do all kinds of stupid stuff when they’re high on orgasms. I’m sure we’re not the first people whose brains have temporarily relocated to their groin areas and had us declare our love by accident.

The sex was incredible—but then, we never had any issues in that regard. From the moment I gave him my virginity on my eighteenth birthday, we were pretty much nonstop and couldn’t keep our hands off each other. He was my first, and I thought he’d be my only. It’s funny how life doesn’t quite turn out like we planned.

The hot sex I can handle. It’s this making me question my sanity. Me lying in his arms with my head on his chest while he trails his fingertips over my side and makes me feel like the most important person in the whole world. This is not so easy to walk away from.

“Hey.” He cups my jaw in his hand, possessive yet gentle, and tilts my head up to look at him. “I can practically hear you overthinking. You want to talk about it? Any of it?”

I shuffle onto my side, resting on my elbow. I don’t want to talk about Enzo and me and the mistakes we made, but I do want to talk about something. “Did you kill him?” I ask, not wanting to say his name aloud and give it any power.

He nods.

“For me?”

He kisses my forehead. “For both of us, cuore mio. And for Tommy. But I made him suffer for you.”

“So many times I thought about revenge. About coming back here and slitting his throat while he slept. Or running him over with my car, but I guess I was…” I blow out a breath because this is hard to admit. “I was scared, Enzo. What if I saw him again and I just froze? And then what if he…” A sob steals the rest of my sentence, but I swallow it down. “What if he hurt me again?”

He offers me a single nod, his dark eyes filled with guilt and regret.

“And then as time passed, I realized it was much easier to not think about him at all. To close myself off to that whole time in my life and focus on my future. So, that’s what I did. And I built myself a nice little life in San Francisco.”

“Do you have friends there? People who’ll be missing you and wondering where you are?”

I shake my head. “Not really. I kept to myself mostly. Some people might view it as lonely, but for me it was peaceful, you know?”

“Jesus, Rayne.” He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me, Enzo Medici,” I warn him.

“I don’t, baby. I am sorry though, that I was such a fucking fool that I didn’t see what was right under my nose. Ethan told me everything. How my father and Carmine set it all up just to get you and Tommy out of my life. To secure my fucking loyalty to the family. Like I was ever fucking disloyal to them.”

It’s a surprise to me that I’m not more shocked by that revelation, but it makes perfect sense. In a very messed-up way of course. Tommy and I gave Enzo a glimpse of a different life, the three of us had even talked about starting out on our own, in a legitimate business. It was only ever talk, but even that was too much for them. Neither his father nor Carmine wanted him to have a life of his own. They wanted all of him.

“What are you going to do now?”

He kisses my forehead. “Tomorrow. Can we talk about that tomorrow? Tonight, I want to focus on you. It feels redundant to ask if you’re okay, but…”

I offer him a smile. “I’m okay. Surprisingly okay.” I trail my fingertips over his abs, over the distinct pink rose tattoo—the only splash of color in a sea of dark ink. I noticed it before, when he was on top of me, but it didn’t seem the appropriate time to ask. “You kept it?”

He brushes his own fingers over his hipbone. He got it the same day I got my daisy tattoo—a design I picked because it was cute and simple. He picked a pink rose because it’s my favorite flower and he bought me eighteen of them the day after we first made love. “Yeah. Every time I saw it, I thought about you.”

Even more reason to have covered it up, I would think. “Didn’t it hurt to do that though?”

“Yeah, baby. Like a motherfucker. But it reminded me that you were mine once.” He wraps me in his arms again. “I’ll never let anyone hurt you ever again. I swear.”

I know he means that, but the irony is he is the one person who hurt me the most. “I guess I should go back to my room.”