Chapter 6
Chapter Six
LIAR
Nix had been stabbed. He didn’t flinch or favor that arm, no, but the scent of medicine was very familiar to me, and when I snuggled into him, I could feel the bandage beneath his shirt over his shoulder.
I would have thought it was something other than stabbing if Flowers, my supposed father, hadn’t told me what he’d done.
Things were getting out of control. I mean, dying was already as out of control as you could get, but I’d been planning my last months to be filled with quiet indulgence.
Nix getting himself stabbed by my birth-father, and then lying about it was the worst kind of karma.
Yes, I’m a liar, and yes, I deserve to be lied to, but how was I supposed to know what was really going on with Nix unless he told me?
I needed to put a tracker on him, and stick cameras all over his office so I knew what was going on.
Maybe I should go undercover as one of his candy girls. No, that would take too much energy.
Maybe I should try being honest with him in the hopes that he’d return the favor. What would me being honest even look like? I had no idea. I’d tried, you know, telling him about Flowers, and my Aunt, but how could I talk about the superhero stuff?
We all went back to the hotel together, me, Aunt Willie, and Nix, taking the elevator directly from the garage to our apartment.
She looked at Nix like he was dangerous, and he smiled with that easy way of his, relaxed, calm, steady, not like he’d been stabbed in the shoulder recently.
I hugged him a lot, and he never flinched even though there was no way bruising didn’t go with the stab wound. He was more stoic than me.
“What time are you going to the restaurant?” Nix asked my aunt after she’d taken the tour and restocked my medical kit. “I’ll call a car for you.”
She raised a brow at him. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
His smile was sweet, with a crinkling at the corner of his eyes as he slipped his strong arm around me and pulled me against him. “Why would I want to do a thing like that?”
She sniffed. “I suppose you know about Sunshine’s medical condition.”
I stiffened up. “We try to focus on the moment. No sense in thinking too much about the future.” beamed up at Nix, and he gave me the softest smile in return.
"Every moment with you is perfection.”
My aunt snorted. “You aren’t interested in prolonging my niece’s life?”
Was she really my aunt? Of course she was. And yet…
“I’d love Kitten to live a long and happy life. If there was something my money could give her…”
“There isn’t,” I said quickly, scowling at my ‘aunt’. “I’m not going through any more expensive and painful treatments just to prolong the inevitable. Nix accepts me as I am. We weren’t going to have a happily ever after anyway. This was always a short-term prospect.”
She barked a hard laugh as she gestured at my husband.
“Do you honestly think that someone like him is willing to accept fate? He’s Nix Hammer!
Or Death-Hammer, who he became after he left his family.
It takes an even more stubborn and strong-willed person to leave than to stay.
Do you honestly think that he’s going away in two days for business that doesn’t involve your life expectancy? ”
I stiffened up. “Are you calling my husband a liar?”
She shook her head and came over to give me a delicate hug, barely touching me, but still not as painless as Nix’s touch.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning. I’ll do your blood work and physical after you’ve had a good night’s rest.” She turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her and leaving me standing there next to the couch that still looked out over the view.
It was lovely out there, bright lights, happy people who weren’t dying…
Was she right about Nix? Was he going to turn into a psychopath who wouldn’t let me die peacefully?
Worse, would he be like my dad after my mom’s death, ruined, searching desperately for a cure that was too late for her? And he wasn’t even my real dad?
I stood there with my heart beating rapidly before I looked up at Nix. “She doesn’t know you very well.”
“Naturally. We’ve only just met.”
I stepped away from him and then turning, punched his shoulder as hard as I could, watching his face for a reaction. There was none. Not surprise, not pain, not anything. He could hide his true motives better than even Daniel. I took another step away from him, frowning.
He raised a brow. “Kitten?”
“Did you getting stabbed by my birth-father have something to do with you trying to save my life?”
He cocked his head slightly, a quizzical expression crossing his face, cover while he thought about the most effective answer to the question about being stabbed when he’d never mentioned it.
I shook my head and turned away, crossing my arms while I felt suddenly cold and delicate. “That wasn’t part of the deal. I should live for six months, and then what does it matter to you whether I’m alive or dead when we’re happily separated?”
He laughed roughly. “Seriously? I’m not supposed to care whether you’re alive or dead whether we’re together or not?”
He admitted that he cared. Michael used to say how much he cared about me before going on long rants about how incredibly gratified I must be to have such a wonderful person as him in my life.
If Nix was actually a truly psychopathic supervillain that I’d somehow managed to control with my secret super power, what did that mean?
I whirled around to stare at Nix, the most handsome, strong, gentle man I’d ever met. He stared back, eyes still warm, gentle, slightly amused.
“You’re the best liar I’ve ever met,” I said, not having to fake the awe in my voice. “Do you even have real feelings?”
He raised a brow. “No. Actions are real, feelings are just what comes before the reality.”
I blinked at him. “Huh. So my feelings of betrayal about you stealthily running around getting stabbed for the sake of my disease aren’t real?”
“They could drive you to do something real but are not themselves so much as vaporous. For instance, my feelings when I learned that you’re dying drove me to find out more about your illness, but the reality of your illness didn’t change just because of how I felt about it.”
“That’s very philosophical of you.”
“We did have a philosophy class together, likely because we both have thoughts about thoughts on the regular.” He smiled and slipped his arms around my waist, pulling me close enough that he could gaze into my eyes with that sweetness that seemed so real.
But I’d seen him in the ring, beating his opponent brutally.
“What are you doing?” I asked, leaning away from him, but not too far. He felt so good, so right, and I’d missed him when he hadn’t come home during the night.
“I’m distracting you from your feelings of betrayal by touching you. Your feelings can change into something much more pleasant if you’ll let me persuade you.” His voice was low, his touch smoothing up my back sending a shiver of awareness through me.
He was incredibly self-aware. Also very aware of my reaction to him, because he wasn’t wrong. My feelings swirled with confusion until his warmth, his strength, the hunger in his eyes overwhelmed everything else.
I wrapped my arms around him, pulled his head down and kissed him, pressing him back until we sprawled onto the couch. He caught me carefully, turning it into a choreographed movement. He was always in control of himself and everyone else around him, even when falling. Especially when falling.
I kissed him until I was breathless, and then I pulled back to tug his shirt up.
He hesitated for only a moment before he pulled it off, showing the very neat bandage on his shoulder and the fading bruises over the rest of his body.
I bent down and started kissing his bruises.
I needed to taste him, to touch him, to make sure something about him was real.
His flesh and blood had to be real, even if his feelings weren’t, right?
“Kitten,” he murmured, catching my face and drawing me back up to face him. “What are you doing?”
“Indulging in these feelings that you inspire with so much impressive skill. What are you going to make me feel next? I’m so intrigued. I’ve never been in the hands of a true supervillain who actually liked to touch me. I’m assuming you like to touch me, but is liking an emotion?”
He frowned slightly. “I don’t like to touch you. I love to touch you. Touching you is extremely real, as is the pleasure I get from it.”
“Ah. But is pleasure real? Isn’t that just a feeling?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Pleasure is like hunger. There’s a real physiological response involved. It’s not just a feeling.”
“You didn’t deny that you’re a supervillain.”
He raised a brow. “A supervillain would lie about being a supervillain.”
“No, a supervillain would evade. I know this for a fact, because that’s what you just did.”
He sighed heavily. “What makes me a supervillain and not just an ordinary villain?”
“The way that you defeat all the other villains. Obviously. Also the fact that the hero stabbed you. The thing that’s freaking me out about all of this is that if you’re a villain, and Beastie’s a villain, and my birth dad’s one of the good guys, does that mean that my real dad kidnapped me?
Did he never love me? Was he just twisted by my weird superpower to keep from killing me? Was none of it ever real?”