12. Max #2
I had tried to keep her out of this. I had wanted to deal with it all on my own while she was safely away from the city. And worst-case scenario, I had planned to take the fall for it all if things ever got that far. I was still willing to do that.
But we were in too deep now. She was in this, and there was no going back.
“Leave,” she said. My heart stuttered to a stop when I thought she was talking to me, but then she turned to the rest of the men in the kitchen. “Leave us, please.”
Cas lingered for a few extra moments while the rest reluctantly left. Ryuji pressed a knife into Leona’s hand and whispered in her ear. She gripped it tightly.
“It’s okay, Cas,” she murmured. Finally, he walked out.
She kept her head down on the counter for at least two minutes, just letting the silence fester between us like a rotting wound. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You should have left the city when I told you to months ago,” I gritted out. Before she could say something that would eviscerate me.
She straightened. Her finger poked into my chest as she crowded closer. Her other hand still gripped the knife. “You’re the one in fucking trouble. Not me.”
“I have been trying to keep you safe.”
“Why?” she pressed.
“Why, what, Leona?”
Her finger pressed harder, like it could cut the truth from my heart itself if only it held the blade. “Why are you trying so hard to protect me? Why do you even care?”
My mouth hung open while the truth caught in my throat. I swallowed.
“Why?” She jabbed my chest, punctuating every word. “Goddamn it. Tell me why!”
“God, you piss me off,” I spat. “Why do you think!”
The reason didn’t even matter, because she was there and I was here and there was no crossing the barrenness that had decayed between us.
“I have no clue! You’ve spent the last four months trying to kill me!”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be!” I almost laughed at the thought.
How many times had I let her go? How many times had I shot at her feet?
Or threatened her when I could have shot her?
How I agonized over pushing her away, getting her out of the city, and she’d refused? “How has that not been clear?”
Her teeth ground together, her eyes fierce. “Tell me the fucking truth, or I swear to God, I will kill you myself.”
She lifted the knife and held it toward me.
I wished she would. I wished she would kill me so I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of acknowledging just how badly things had turned. But the way her eyes blazed…they were gorgeous in their fury. She was a vision in her anger, in her passion.
I’d stopped looking at her so long ago, and now that I was seeing her—truly looking at her again—I couldn’t look away.
Without another thought, I surged forward. My lips were on hers. My hands were pulling her body against me. My tongue was darting into her mouth.
She instantly reacted.
She dropped the knife. It clattered to the ground, and I kicked it away.
Her hands fisted in my hair, her back arching as my palms dug into the small of her back.
I walked her backward until we hit the wall, and then before I knew what I was doing, I hiked her legs up to pin her against it.
My body settled between her legs like it was fucking made to be there.
“Leona.” The sound was strangled, both a whisper and a prayer. “Leona.”
She whimpered—a fucking miracle of a sound—when my hips pressed hard against her. God, my body was on fire from the inside out. There was nothing I could do to quench it, no balm except her.
My hands trembled as they explored her sides, trailing up and down, molding the shape of her body to my memory.
Her fingers fisted into my shirt and yanked, and it was all I needed to take the hint.
I separated from her lips for only the time required to pull it off and drop it to the ground.
My ribs were on fire, my bruises throbbing, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
The dam had broken within me. Years of buried feelings were gushing out all at once. My hands felt for her body underneath her leather jacket—this thing drove me to insanity with how powerful she looked in it. Her little gasp when my fingertips brushed over her bare skin had my mind unraveling.
“You have no idea,” I whispered against her lips. “No idea.”
“Tell me, then,” she returned. “I need to hear it.”
I kissed her softly, over and over, drawing her hair over her shoulder. I trailed a line down her neck, relishing in the sharp pinprick of pain that came when she yanked on my hair. Her fingertips floated over my skin, leaving a trail of fire in their wake.
She groaned when my thigh pressed against her core. The heat there was a beacon, and I needed to explore it, to know it. My fingers dipped into the waist of her jeans. This want, this need to search, would consume me.
“Max.” Her voice wobbled, enough for me to hear the hesitance. I instantly pulled back. My heart pounded a beat within my veins. “Tell me the truth about this. For once. You said you needed time. I need it now.”
My heart twisted in my chest. She waited for me to say something, to explain myself, to tell her what she wanted to hear, but nothing came. The longer it took, the more her face shuttered until her hands pressed against my chest.
The reality of our lives, everything I’d shoved away so I could take a fleeting second to finally feel her, came crashing back in. Everything I’d done to her. All the shit that waited for us in the days ahead.
I let her body slide down mine until she stood in front of me.
I couldn’t tell her, because there was no way she would ever truly forgive me. I had no right to her. No right to speak the words aloud. I didn’t deserve them, or her.
And when she woke up and realized that, the pain of her loss would be more acute than anything I’d ever felt before.
It would kill me.
Finally, she looked up at me. Her palm grazed over the bare skin of my abs, right at the bottom of the stitches holding my skin together and the bandage covering the wound. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
“I’ve spent my entire life trying to get you to love me, Max.” Her voice broke on my name, but then she steeled herself. She looked me in the eye, and the pain there proved to me all over again I had fucked up. There was no coming back. She wouldn’t forgive me. “I’m not doing it anymore.”
She slipped through my grasp like water.