Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Fiero
One week to go.
“I have to get home,” she murmurs quietly into my chest. “I need to see my father.”
She sits up sleepily, cotton sheets pooling around her. The daylight makes her almost irridescent and I’m suddenly struck by how staggeringly brave she is.
Last night she discovered that not only had her uncle photographed her in compromised positions when she was blacked out, but that I had hacked him to death. Not to mention letting me fuck her with the weapon I used.
I can’t believe she’s still here.
She’s under no illusion whatsoever as to what a monster I am. She’s seen me kill with her own eyes. She’s seen the evidence that I brutally murdered her uncle and she hasn’t run. I always thought she was perfect. But now, I know she is.
I sit up beside her and run fingers through my hair. “What will you tell him?”
She rubs her eyes and looks at her hands curled in her lap. “I don’t know. He’s not well and I don’t want to make him feel worse.”
“He’s not well?” I don’t want to let on that her uncle already informed me of this—yet another thing he took away from her.
“I think he has dementia but I haven’t been able to get him to a doctor yet. That’s why I came back to New York. He’s been forgetful and getting confused over small things. I’m worried that telling him about Callum might be too upsetting.”
“What’s stopping you from getting him to a doctor?”
“I don’t have medical insurance.” She pans to me slowly. “I don’t have a job—officially.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can think. “I’ll pay. Make the appointment and send me the medical bill.”
She stares at me. “What? You can’t do that.”
“Yes I can. I’m your employer and it’s part of the package. I just haven’t had the opportunity to take you through it yet.”
It’s not a lie; I simply hadn’t anticipated ever employing Pfeiffer McAllister. That sentence alone makes me want to laugh out loud. A month ago, she was nothing but a villain in the back of my mind. Now, she’s in the front of my mind, in my bed, fucking my knife.
She’s everywhere, and I like it.
Her eyes narrow. “Do the other staff get medical insurance?”
“They do actually. It helps us appear legit.”
She nods, almost approvingly.
“Okay then, I’ll make him an appointment.” Then she disarms me with a soft smile. “Thank you.”
My chest swells possessively. “What about your uncle? Are you going to tell your father?”
She frowns slightly and her gaze trails off. “Not yet. It might do more harm than good. I’ll wait to hear what the doctors say.”
She studies her hands for a moment. “So, what happens now?”
Something collapses inside me. I know exactly what she’s asking. Callum McAllister is dead and the month is nearly up. I have to let her go.
The realization hits me like another fucking bullet. Because I don’t want to. Not even close.
I look over at her, the sunlight spilling over her skin, catching in the loose waves of her strawberry-blonde hair, and a dark selfishness unfurls inside my ribcage.
One month.
That’s all I was supposed to want.
One month to make her suffer. One month to settle the score that’s haunted me since childhood. One month to watch her crawl beneath the weight of what she did to me.
Instead I’m sitting here trying to figure out how the fuck I’m supposed to say goodbye now that I’ve had her in my bed. Now that I know how she sleeps, how I calm her, how I turn her on and the sounds she murmurs against my lips when she comes.
Christ.
I haven’t even touched her properly yet.
The thought arrives out of nowhere and nearly drives me insane.
I haven’t spread her open beneath my hands and learned every inch of her body. I haven’t heard the sounds she’d make if I used my fingers on her as well as my mouth. I haven’t held her face between my palms as she comes apart. I know she would let me, if only I had more time.
This business between us is so unfinished it’s barely started.
But it’s worse than that.
Somewhere between revenge and obsession, I made the gravest mistake a man like me can make. I started wanting things from her that have nothing to do with sex.
I want to feel her hand in mine as we show our faces in public. I want her in my apartment in the mornings with that sleepy expression on her face. I want to hear her footsteps in my rooms.
I want to crush the black feather I locked in my desk drawer days ago.
But my brothers—
A muscle jumps hard in my jaw.
They would never accept this—not after what happened. They still hate her the way I should.
But when I look at her now, I don’t see the awful things she said and did, that led to a chain of events that changed me inside and out. I see a frightened young woman who’s had to survive things that would’ve shattered many others.
If my brothers discover what’s happening between us—what I’m feeling—they’ll see it as weakness. Betrayal, even. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Pfeiffer lifts her gaze, uncertainty swimming in her bright blue eyes as she waits for my answer.
I can’t keep her openly. Not until I understand what the hell this thing between us is becoming—and whether I’m prepared to burn my entire life down for it. Which, disturbingly, no longer feels impossible.
I rub a thumb over my bottom lip and her cheeks flush sending an explosion of heat through my abdomen.
“What do you want, Pfeiffer?” I rasp. “Do you want to understand what this is between us? Or do you want to leave?”
Her lips part, the rise and fall of her chest pronounced beneath my shirt.
She breathes in deep. “I want to be around for my dad,” she says on a heavy exhalation. “I want to work as a nurse again. I want to feel settled.”
My heart thuds low and deep, on the edge of fracturing.
“But no. I don’t want to leave you.”
Turning her fiercely, I catch her lips in a desperate kiss, pushing her back against the bed. I sweep my tongue into her mouth and she reciprocates, both of us taking as much of each other as we can.
A moan passes from her throat to mine sending me dizzy. I pull apart for just a second.
“Good. Stay.”
We lay still, our breaths mingling and calming together, heartbeats slowing. A nick of panic cuts through the haze of being one with her.
I’m in too deep. I’m falling off a cliff into unsettled waters, unsure if there’s a riptide below the surface.
What will she do when she finds out who I am?
A sudden awareness of my vulnerability opens my mouth and I say the words that could break us in an instant.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”
The question balances on a tightrope stretched between us. My heart climbs up my throat and I hate that. I don’t want to feel vulnerable in this moment. What if she does realize who I am and her contempt for me back then resurfaces?
I would kill her.
And then I’d kill half of New York.
They would need a new word to describe the kind of rage I’d unleash on the City.
She lifts her head.
“What?” she asks quietly.
I exhale to force my shoulders back down.
“We were at school together. High school.”
I roll over to face her. I don’t want to see her expression—I want to dissociate completely. But I have to see her reaction, read into it, and see if she still feels the way she used to.
She frowns. “Berman High?”
I nod, my gaze zooming in on the smallest indications she might remember something.
“You were at Berman High?” Her face brightens first then turns a greyish color which sets my pulse on edge.
“I used to get the PATH train from Jersey every day.”
“What… class?”
“I was in the same class as you.”
“Y-you were?” Her eyes glaze over a little and she looks past me to a spot above the bed. “I don’t remember.”
My insides practically melt with relief.
“That’s okay. I was a quiet kid, believe it or not. Hated school, especially that one.”
“Right,” she says, not really listening.
I press my finger beneath her chin and pull her gaze back. “Are you okay?”
She swallows and some of the blood drains from her skin. “I, um… I don’t remember a lot from that time, really. I’m sorry. I wish I did.”
I watch her carefully—I need to be sure she’s telling the truth.
Something seems to snap behind her flailing focus. “That’s so weird though… I was at school with the great Il Diavolo…” A smile curls her lips. “Don’t take this the wrong way but I find it hard to imagine you at school.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… you seem like you’re beyond school. Too iconic for it.”
“Iconic?”
“Like you came from a different world—one far more exciting than mine.”
I press a long kiss to her forehead. “You’re fucking adorable, you know that?”
She blushes and snuggles into my chest, injecting a year’s supply of endorphins into my bloodstream.
My fingers ache to touch her. It would feel like the most natural thing in the world, but to her it isn’t.
If I could kill Callum McAllister all over again for what he did, I would.
But the fucker is dead, and the thing about homicide is, you can’t really go back and do it again—differently, more insidiously, or more violently. What’s done is done.
“Do you think you can trust me?” I whisper into her hair.
She’s still for a long time before she answers. “Yes.”
“Do you think you might one day let me touch you?”
There’s another long pause, then her response surprises me.
“Maybe. I’d like to try.”
My chest expands and I curl strands of strawberry blonde hair around my fingers.
“Soon then,” I say softly, not wanting to scare her.
I feel her mouth smile against my skin and my lids slide shut. Then we both fall back into a warm, languid slumber.