Page 89 of Twisted Fate

“Goodnight,” I say back, as I hear her breathing turn soft.

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The first dayin the safe house is the strangest. I wake before she does, having moved too close to her in the night for my own comfort, and get up, retreating to the bathroom to ease the stubborn arousal that I can’t shake around her. Frustration worms through me as I turn on the shower and step under the hot spray, my hand already wrapped around my aching cock, knowing that I could go back in there and demand she take care of the problem she’s created. But doing so would only further blur the already scrambled lines between us, and the logical side of my brain knows this is the better way to handle it.

Still, it doesn’t stop me from moaning her name as I come, splattering the tiles with it as I fuck my fist and picture her face twisted with pleasure as I imagine it’s her instead.

For all of that first day, we circle each other warily, two predators sharing a space that’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable for us both. We eat our meals in relative silence, Valentina loses herself in a book, and I check in with my contact, giving him the information that Valentina relayed to me. Her maiden name—Sawyer—and the names of her parents, her old childhood address, all of that.

The second day passes much the same way, until I wake to find her not in bed in the middle of the night. I’m up in an instant, prowling through the house with every sense on high alert as I look for her, half-expecting her to leap out at me from the shadows with a knife or to hear the crack of a gun in the split second before a bullet finds its mark. But instead, I find her in the kitchen, sitting at the quartz island with a piece of coconut banana bread and a glass of water as she picks at it, crumbling the snack between her fingers more than eating it. She turned on the light above the sink, keeping it to a minimum.

“What are you doing?”

She jumps when she hears my voice, pivoting on the stool to look at me. She’s wearing just that oversized T-shirt again, and I feel my cock twitch and threaten to swell at the thought of what’s—or rather whatisn’t—under it.

“I couldn’t sleep.” She crumbles another bit of banana bread between her fingers. “I keep dreaming about my parents.” Her gaze slides away from mine, toward the covered window over the sink. “I can’t really see their faces any longer. Just—shadows, with little details. Except my father’s face, as he was dying. I can still see that. It’s the only way I remember what he looked like.”

Her voice tightens as she speaks, choked by the time she finishes, and I stand there in the doorway of the kitchen, gonevery still as I listen. Even if she hadn’t told me already that she’s never talked about it with anyone before, I would know from the sound of her voice. She sounds very much like someone who, finally, can’t hold it all in any longer.

Why me? Why tell me, now, after all this time?But I already know the answer, as I circle around the island to come and sit across from her. She and I share a bond that she doesn’t have with anyone else, except for maybe Kane, the man who raised her and, in her mind, in some ways saved her. She and I are linked together, by law, by intimacy, by our own flesh… and we tried to kill one another, and failed. For people like us, that’s a bond too, in and of itself.

“Tell me what you do remember,” I urge quietly. I want to reach across for her hand, but I don’t. I have the feeling that she might pull it away, that it might break the moment between us.

She draws in a slow breath, and then, she does. Slowly at first, halting words and phrases, and then with more confidence as she settles into the memories she does have. Her father’s laugh. The garden her mother kept behind the house. The smell of her mother’s chocolate chip cookies after school. A familiar cartoon that she watched every Saturday morning.

My chest tightens with every word she says, pain filling the hollow space there, because I realize that Valentina was born into anormallife. Or at least, it seems so. All of this that she’s a part of now—the crime, the killing, the world of mafia and Bratva and assassins—all of that is directly at odds with a little girl who watchedWinnie the Poohon Saturday mornings and loved white chocolate chip cookies more than milk chocolate ones.

There’s something more to it. I’m sure there must be. But it’s something, I think, that Valentina doesn’t know. And a part of me hates that I’m going to be the one to unearth it for her,that I’m going to shatter some part of the innocence of those memories.

She asks me about my childhood, then. It’s less innocent, less idyllic. But I tell her what I can. And we talk until I can start to see the edges of dawn breaking around the corners of the curtains, before retreating back to the bedroom for a few more hours of sleep. I watch Valentina drift off, and I can tell that some of the tension has left her, that she’s more relaxed now. Like she cleared out some blighted part of herself.

On the third day, there’s a storm, one bad enough that I double-check to make sure that there’s not a hurricane coming in that I was unaware of. There’s a system that might turn into a tropical storm, but nothing so dangerous that I need to worry about evacuating us. Instead, we sit in the living room, opening the curtains the smallest sliver so that we can watch the lightning flicker across the sky and the rain lash against the windows. The lamp that we have on flickers, and then goes out completely, leaving us in the greyish dark of the stormy evening.

I get up, lighting a few thick pillar candles, and come back to sit at the opposite end of the couch from Valentina. She’s watching the rain, and I watch her as she pushes a piece of dark hair behind her ear, my own fingers itching to touch her. It’s been three days now, and my body craves her in a way that I never knew it was possible to crave another person.

Sometimes I wonder if I crave her more because she is so deadly. If I’m aroused by the danger, the act of fucking someone who is my equal in every way.

The air between us is charged with its own sort of electricity. I look at her, finally asking the question that I still don’t have an answer to.

“Why did you marry me?”

Valentina looks at me sharply, her green eyes narrowing. Another bolt of lightning lights up her face, sharpening it in the bluish light.

“If the mission was to kill me, then why the elaborate setup?” I clarify. “Why the far-flung honeymoon? It was Kane who suggested it to my father, I’m sure of that, now. Why not just get close enough to me during the engagement to finish me off?”

Valentina pauses. “The job was important to Kane,” she says finally. “He’s a man of precision. You have a lot of security here… usually,” she adds with a small laugh. “When you’re not in your penthouse or hiding out here. He thought that the resort where we went to honeymoon would make for a secluded enough place that it could be done quietly. Easier to do, easier to cover up.” She looks away, drumming her fingers against her thigh as thunder rolls through the sky outside. “He wanted me to get close to you, too. To make sure that you wouldn’t see it coming, that there was no chance of failure. Afterward, I would play the grieving widow, and then disappear.”

My lips thin. “That didn’t work out as you planned, did it? Getting close enough to me to make sure you didn’t fail?”

Her gaze slants toward me again, and I see her throat move. “No,” she admits softly. “It didn’t.”

I know this is the moment that I could move. I could lean forward, cross the distance between us, and capture her mouth with mine. It wouldn’t be a lie this time, wouldn’t be a pretense. I could have her, and it would be honest.

I see a tremor run through her, and I know she feels it, too. I see her hands flex, and I start to shift forward, to close the distance between us as my cock lengthens along my thigh, already eager for her.

Lightning cracks across the sky, at the same time as a sharp knock comes at the door, hard and insistent.

We both jump apart, going very still.

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