28. Riley
“You good, princess?”Dante murmurs, sprawling out on the floor next to me.
He tugs me against his side and presses a kiss against my temple, then settles my head on his shoulder, idly tracing the patterns of drying paint on my body.
It’s nice…. and I’m beyond good.
“Quit fishing,” I say, biting back a smile.
He snorts quietly. We’ve both got our eyes trained on the canvas, but I still catch his grin in my peripheral vision.
“Want me to go grab us something to drink?”
I shake my head without bothering to raise it. I’ve got no interest in moving again, possibly ever, and from the total relaxation I can feel in Dante’s body right now, he seems to feel the same.
I lazily wave a hand toward the canvas, both my brain and body buzzing with afterglow. “What are you going to do with that? It’s a mess.”
“Nah. It’s beautiful. The best one yet. Maybe I’ll hang it in my room. I’ve been thinking of putting something up there.”
I laugh. He’s over the top. But I can’t deny that the idea of Dante sleeping under that particular painting sends some heat through me. “Is that what you were planning for it? Painting something for your room?”
He shrugs, his shoulder rippling under my head, but doesn’t answer.
I roll onto my side and prop myself up on my elbows, resting them on his chest. “No, really. What was it going to be?”
When I walked in, the half-finished canvas was full of the bold colors I always associate with Dante now, but laid down in a way that seemed almost violent. It sucked me in, just like all his art does, and I want to know.
I want to know him.
“I was just painting out a dream I had,” he finally says without taking his eyes away from the canvas.
“Must have been an intense one,” I tease.
He grimaces, then shrugs again. “Yeah. It was pretty bad.”
“Oh.” I know there’s a lot more to him than the easy-going charm that’s usually on display, but I’m not used to him letting me see it. “A nightmare?”
“Not my first,” he says, his lips quirking up as he finally tears his eyes away from the painting and looks at me. “Bad shit tends to surface in the still of the night, you know? Painting is a pretty good way of dealing with it, though.”
I remember that he told me something similar the first time he showed me his studio, about how painting helps him unwind and process things, and I wonder if the “bad shit” he was putting onto the canvas is somehow my fault. Something to do with all the shit that’s come down on the Reapers thanks to our ongoing search for Chloe.
Dante smooths a hand down my bare back and cups my ass. “What is it, princess? I can feel you thinking too hard.”
I scoff, but I don’t hate the idea that he sees me that well. “You can’t feel something like that.”
“Sure I can. Come on now, tell me.”
I look back at the painting. At the red explosion he decorated the middle with, and how my body softened it. Spread it around and changed it. “I was wondering what your dream was about. What kind of bad shit you wanted to work through.”
“My dad.”
The tension he must have picked up on eases out of my body with his answer. I’m glad it’s not my fault. But now I’m also curious. Dante hasn’t told me much about his past, but he did give me the impression that he had a good relationship with his father. Nothing like what Chloe and I have had to deal with in Frank. But if Dante’s having nightmares about the man…
“Did something happen to him?” I ask hesitantly.
Dante sighs, his gorgeous face going bleak for a moment. Then he nods.
For a moment, I think he’s going to leave it at that, and I decide not to push. Just because he’s admitted to having feelings for me doesn’t mean I’m entirely sure what to do with those feelings, or whether they can really go anywhere.
But then he opens up.
“A lot of shit happened to my old man. He was a hitman. Freelance. And since I trained up with him, some of what I saw, what we did, pops up in my dreams from time to time. But those are just memories, not really nightmares.” He glances at me for a moment, then looks away again. “Killing doesn’t bother me.”
I wonder if he thinks I might judge him for that.
I wonder if I do judge him for that.
I sit with it for a moment, and realize I don’t.
Death happens, and there are plenty of pieces of shit out there who deserve to die. Plenty who deserve a hell of a lot more than that too. I just can’t find it in me to give a shit that Dante’s the one who sometimes deals out the sentence. It’s not even really a surprise, given his position with the Reapers.
And maybe, if I’m brutally honest with myself, that darkness inside me finds that part of him just as appealing as all the rest.
“Then what does bother you?” I ask, thinking of the red paint he attacked the canvas with again.
Dante sends me another long look. “The way he died.”
Not that he died, but the way it happened. Or maybe both.
I fold my arms on his chest and sink down, pressing our bodies together again as I rest my chin on my folded hands. “Tell me?”
Dante smiles, a small, soft one, and cups the back of my head, lifting his for a kiss. Then he folds the arm that’s not gripping my ass under his head and looks back at the painting.
“Dad started training me before I could walk. Even before he let me touch any tools of the trade, it was the rest. How to read people. Situational awareness. Picking out targets, noticing a tail, all that shit. As soon as I was old enough not to fuck up the job for him, he started taking me with him.”
An involuntary shiver goes through me. “He killed people in front of you?”
Dante’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “My degree wasn’t the book-learning type, princess. Some skills gotta be hands-on.”
I nod, my eyes lingering on his bicep, flexed and bulging in this position. I can’t help wondering if any of the intricate patterns and images inked onto his body—maybe the row of dark birds drawn in silhouette that wander across his arm there—represent that part of his past. If they represent his kills.
Maybe someday I’ll ask.
“Anyway, it’s not that shit that gets to me, is my point. And in some ways, it’s not even watching him die.” He pauses, then shakes his head. “No, it is that. He was taken out right in front of me, and it never should have happened. Not like that. He was too good. I mean, I’m better.” His lips briefly lift in a familiar cocky smirk that’s just as sexy as the first time I saw it, “But he was too good to be taken by surprise the way he was.”
“Someone set him up,” I guess, putting the pieces together. “Or… betrayed him?”
Dante’s face darkens. “That’s right. Not the first shithead who tried. Dad worked for a long time. Decades. He pissed a lot of people off and had a fuckload of enemies… or he would have, if all those pissed-off motherfuckers had known for sure it was Dad who pulled the trigger. But even though the right players knew who to call when they needed a hit, Dad was hella good at covering his tracks. Unless you were the one who hired him, you could never be sure he was the one who’d actually done the deed.”
“But?”
“But then someone double-crossed him. Someone he’d done a lot of work for passed his name to another interested party. Let them know that Dad was responsible for taking out a key player in their organization. And since Dad trusted the guy, he wasn’t watching his back the way he should when he agreed to a meet.”
“And you were there.”
Dante’s lips compress into a thin line, and he nods, eyes fixated on the painting we made again. “I was there. Got recurring nightmares about it now, and what, a dozen? Two dozen canvases maybe? All with that moment—or with, you know, my feelings about that moment—splashed across them.”
“The moment he died?”
“The moment I took out the son of a bitch who was responsible for it.”
“Does it help?”
He drags his eyes away from the canvas and looks down at me, his expression softening. “Yeah, princess, it does.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
My heart clenches. He was so young. And from what he’s told me before, alone after that. Alone and looking for family, looking for a place to belong where loyalty was a real thing instead of the mockery of it that his father had found.
“Hey now, I don’t want your pity.”
I narrow my eyes, my heart tripping. “You’ve got to stop doing that.”
“What, reading every thought and emotion on that gorgeous face of yours, like you’re a wide open book?” he asks with a grin.
I laugh, because yeah. Exactly that.
He rolls us over, pinning me beneath him, and kisses me hard. “You’ll have to get used to it.” Then he sighs, resting his forehead against mine. “But I didn’t tell you that shit to make you feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t.”
It’s the truth.
“Good,” he says, “’cause as far as I’m concerned, pity’s a wasted emotion. It’s never gonna change anything. Doesn’t get you ahead. So what’s the point? Life is fucking chaos, all the time. Unpredictable. Messy. Full of pain. Shit happens, and you roll with it or you die. And I know you get that, because I’ve seen you do the same.”
I nod, my throat tightening up with emotion. I do get that, and I love that he sees me so well. That he noticed. And if I also still feel a little sorry for him anyway, for all the shit he had to go through at such a young age, for the loss and the years before he found what he’s got now, then he’ll just have to get used to it.
Or at least get over it.
Or… fine. I just won’t mention that part to him. Ever. But I’m suddenly fiercely, violently glad he found the family and loyalty he craves with the Reapers. That he has Maddoc and Logan now, two men who will always have his back. Who would sooner cut off their own arms than sell him out to suffer the fate his father did.
“I don’t pity you,” I tell him, “but I do feel…”
He cups the back of my head. “What?”
“Close to you.” My throat almost closes over the whispered words. I’m not used to being so vulnerable with people. I’m also not used to feeling safe enough to want to. This time, I’m the one who cups his cheek. “Thank you for telling me about your father.”
He turns his face and kisses my palm. “I want you to know me, princess. I want…”
“What?”
He shrugs. “A lot of shit.” Then he grins. “But like I said, life is chaos. It’s not like I’m actually expecting to get any of it.”
God, can I ever relate to that sentiment.
Dante’s right when he says I understand his philosophy about pity, about life. I’ve wanted a lot of shit over the years too. And, like Dante, I never expect to get much of it and have never been all that surprised when what really happened instead just made life all the harder.
But sometimes, like right now, things actually turn out… kind of fucking wonderful.
I bite my tongue. I don’t want to jinx it, so I’m sure as shit not going to say so, but I’m also full of feelings. Feelings I don’t have words for, or maybe just not the courage to say.
But this is Dante. He doesn’t need words.
With Dante still pinning me down, I can’t reach the paintbrush I dropped near the canvas, but I can reach the palette. I reach for it and drag a finger through the messy swirl of thick paint on it, coating my finger in the vivid red of blood Dante chooses for so much of his art and the deep blue of tears and sorrow and pain. They blend into the same shade of purple in my hair, and in all that mess, there’s a bright, vivid green too. The color of Dante’s eyes. The color of life, instead of all that death that haunts his nightmares.
Dante gives me a bemused look. “You want to paint some more?”
“You’re the one who told me it’s a good way to process things.”
“Fact,” he murmurs, letting me push him back just enough that I’m able to smooth my clean hand down his shoulder and rest it against his chest.
He already has color there. Gorgeous, intricate ink that I could get lost in. But unlike the full sleeves on his arms, his chest still has unmarked skin in some places too.
One of those places is right over his heart.
I touch the messy finger I dipped into paint to his skin. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and I’m certainly no artist, but he’s already shown me that neither of those things are necessary for this shit. For working through feelings. For painting emotion.
“Fuck,” Dante whispers, his cock hardening against me as he swoops down and captures my mouth, trapping my painted finger between us. When he comes up for air, he looks down at his chest. “It kinda looks like my birds.”
I tilt my head. I see it. He means the row of ravens I noticed on his arm earlier, but this one is bigger. Bolder. And not black, but bright. Not a crisp, well-defined silhouette, but messy and chaotic and colorful. It looks exactly how I feel.
He rubs his thumb over the top of my right breast. The paint I marked him with smudged onto my skin too, but unlike the bare spot over Dante’s heart, my entire chest is already a colorful mess. The new mark is just one more slash of color, blending in with the rest.
Dante rolls off me and grabs the brush, dipping it into the blood-red paint and bringing it to my skin.
“More? You already painted all over me.”
“I want to mark you up a little more,” he says, intent on doing just that.
The wet paint is so smooth that it feels like liquid sex, and my nipples pebble with desire as he carefully drags the brush over the fresh paint we smudged onto me when we kissed.
“You were made for this color,” he murmurs, his eyes trained on whatever it is he’s painting on me. He finishes up and tosses the brush aside, then covers my breast with his hand, fingers splayed wide to frame the mark he made and palm rubbing against the hard nub of my nipple. “I like seeing this shit here.”
I look down, trying to see it too.
It’s… not a thing. Not a picture. But it’s definitely an emotion. A curving, spiraling, twisting mark that’s bold and dangerous-looking and hopeful. It’s a burst of color—the crimson shade that Dante once told me is his favorite—that feels like all the sex we just had, and all the reasons we had it.
His cock swells where it’s trapped between us and I spread my legs, arching up against him as I grab the back of his head and pull him down. “Kiss me.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice a husky murmur. “We can start with that.”
But we don’t, thank fuck, end there… because apparently, every once in a while, good things actually do last.