Chapter Seventeen Lila
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LILA
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Why did I help him? Why didn’t I look the other way and let karma finish the job?
I’d been awake as usual, staring at the ceiling, when I felt the sharp bang of the entrance door reverberating through my spine. When I walked out of my room, I noticed the carnage.
I wanted to let him die…
But something inside me refused to be as ruthless as the men in my life. And while Tiernan was a terrible human, he never crossed my red lines. He didn’t force himself upon me, made sure I always ate, and even took me to see the sunset.
I knew, from watching old Mama-approved movies, that allowing your wife to stab and shoot you didn’t qualify as romance. However, in our world, it made for a damn decent husband.
Besides, I never missed a chance to suture.
It was my first time stitching a human. Not that he needed to know that. All my other experience was with pig bellies and chickens. Imma was a nurse back in Naples before she joined our family. She’d taught me some useful skills to help me pass the time, since I didn’t go to school.
But the most dangerous thing of all wasn’t Tiernan finding out, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I wasn’t intellectually impaired. It wasn’t even the fact that he frightened me with his even pulse and dead, abrasive stare the entire time I worked on his wound, unmoved by the pain.
No. It was the complete and utter chaos that swirled in my body at our briefest touch.
On our wedding night, I thought I needed to hurt him to feel the gooey, warm honey in the pit of my stomach. Now, I realized, I simply needed to touch him.
His body felt good. All lithe, sculpted muscles. Inked with tattoos I wanted to trace, and study, and maybe even kiss. Warm. Alive. Safe. The latter was stupid, I knew. The man promised he’d force himself on me if he found out I was a spy.
But he had so many chances.
So many opportunities to take what our world deemed was his.
Yet he didn’t.
The hatred I wanted so badly to cling onto was slipping between my fingers like quicksand. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe I realized my ire should be directed at my father and my rapist.
Either way, Tiernan “the Deathless” Callaghan was no longer the man I hated the most.
Worse still, he no longer felt like the enemy.