Page 87 of Brutal Union
The door creaks open again, and for a second my heart leaps.
But it’s not Sho.
Aoi strides in like she owns the room—because she does. Tall, elegant, and lethal in tight black slacks and a silk blouse that doesn't have a single wrinkle despite the chaos outside. Her long black hair is pulled back, and her earrings sparkle under the flickering overhead light as she saunters toward me.
She eyes me up and down like I’m a bloody canvas someone left in her gallery.
“Well, well,” she purrs, her voice low and mocking. “Looks like someone's been averynaughty girl.”
I lift my head, pain still throbbing through my shoulder, through every limb. I don’t want to do this—not now—but I will if she pushes me. I meet her gaze squarely.
“Don’t make me disrespect you in your own establishment,” I snap, voice sharp and cold despite the ache spreading through my bones. “Not when I’m trying to be polite.”
Aoi’s eyes sparkle with amusement, lips curving into a slow, delighted smile.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she says with a quiet laugh, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “You’d need both arms working to pull that off.”
Before I can react, she’s behind me.
There’s no warning. Just a sudden, brutal grip on my dangling arm.
I suck in a breath, spinning, but her hand is already on my shoulder, the other wrapped around my elbow. She yanks.
White-hot pain shoots through my chest, seizing everything in its path.
Snap.
A sharp pop echoes in the small room as my shoulder slams back into its socket.
I scream—a sound that punches from my throat involuntarily, choked off as quickly as it came. I crumple to one knee, breath ripped from my lungs, eyes wet with the sudden jolt of agony.
Aoi crouches next to me, still smiling, completely unfazed.
“You’re welcome,” she says, brushing imaginary dust off her knee.
I grip my arm, rubbing at the newly repositioned socket. “I am not feeling very thankful bitch.”
“If it were up to me,” she says, breaking the silence as she tears open a sterile packet of antiseptic, “you’d already be dead.”
I lift my eyes to her and speak through gritted teeth. “Good thing it is not up to you.”
She kneels in front of me without ceremony, not gentle but not cruel, and begins wiping the blood from my arms with a damp cloth. The sting is immediate, sharp. My jaw clenches, but I don’t pull away.
She tilts her head, studying a particularly deep gash just above my bicep. “Sho wouldn’t forgive me, though. Not for that.”
I scoff, the sound bitter. “He almost killed me himself. Twice.”
Aoi dabs the wound clean and starts applying a numbing solution, her movements precise. “That’s not the same,” she says coolly. “He didn’t want you dead. He just wanted you to feel it.”
“Feel what?”
She meets my eyes. “Everything that you put him through for the last three years.”
We fall into a tense silence again as she starts sealing one of the deeper cuts with liquid stitches. It burns like fire across my skin, but I bite down on the pain. She presses a gauze pad into another wound to stop the slow bleed, her hands methodical, practiced.
“He loves you, but he is not above punishing those who have wronged him,” Aoi says casually, like she’s pointing out a stain on my shirt.
“I know.”
