Page 56 of You Only Love Twice
"I wasn't worried about you running." No, he'd seen the way her gaze dipped to his belt and the array of knives there.
"I thought we'd grown past that?"
"That doesn't mean I trust you.'"
"Likewise. What I am curious about is precisely what you intend to do with me." Gemma slanted a look at him from beneath the dangerous fan of her black lashes. They were spiked together with water. "Kidnapping usually serves a purpose. You haven't made any demands of Malloryn, as far as I can work out. You haven't tortured me for information. You've barely spoken to me. Apart from your penchant for handcuffs, I'd think you quite content to lock me away for an undetermined period of time." Her expression shifted, her shoulder lifting coquettishly. "One could be mistaken for thinking this an obsession. And yet, you also seem to have no intentions of touching me unless necessary."
Curse her quick mind. He turned away from her, fractured memories of her bleeding through his mind like the broken pieces of a stained glass window.
He knew they should fit together somehow, and yet all he managed was fragments.
The quick flash of her laughter.
Hollis tucking a scrap of paper down her bodice with a knowing little smile, as if aware of how it drew his eyes.
The feel of her hand sliding down his naked abdomen.
Waking from a drugged stupor to flames creeping up his bed hangings, and her lithe body conveniently vanished from the bed.
Obsidian pressed a hand to his temples as they throbbed.
She's a weakness you cannot afford.
Months of aversion therapy flashed through his mind, sending a searing wave of pain across his nerves. He could almost feel the leather mouthpiece between his teeth, preventing him from biting his own tongue off as Ghost fisted a handful of his hair and wrenched his head back, "Tell me about the girl. The one you betrayed your brothers for."
"She's a lying, treacherous bitch,"he'd finally spat, and then Dr. Richter shocked him with electric current one more time, just to reinforce the message.
The conditioning worked well.
It had been years since he'd thought of Gemma without feeling a flinch along his nerves. He'd even stood there in Ghost's parlor four months ago when they first arrived in London and stared dully at her photograph when Ghost pinned Malloryn's allies to the board—the targets he and his team ofdhampirwere preparing to destroy. Nothing in him had stirred at the sight of her pretty heart-shaped face, except for pain, and he'd locked eyes on his Master and said flatly,"She's mine."
He'd meant as a target. The knot of pain and past that tied him and Gemma together was something he'd vowed to finally erase.
Until the second he watched one of Ghost's minions try to end her life... and realized whatever she'd once meant to him, those ties still bound him.
"Dmitri?" she whispered, pulling him out of the fragmented mire of the past.
"Dmitri's dead," he said tonelessly. "There is only Obsidian."
"I'm not entirely certain that's the truth."
He looked at her sharply.
"Obsidian would have let me drown today. Obsidian would have killed me himself. Do you know what I think? I think someone wants me dead, and Dmitri kidnapped me so this mysterious person who was hunting us couldn't get their hands on me."
"Do you? It sounds almost as plausible as your tale of our past."
"It's an outlandish theory," Gemma admitted, her lip still shivering. "But they're the best ones. So what now?" She examined their accommodations. "It's a little less roomy than my observatory." Her gaze fell on the bed. "And I have an atrocious habit of sprawling across the entire bed when I sleep, so it looks like it shall be close quarters. E-elbows at two paces. That kind of thing."
Their eyes met again.
He knew what she was doing. Pushing him. A flirtatious challenge to see just what he intended to do with her.
"Who said you're getting the bed?" Obsidian arched a defiant brow.
"Y-you blackguard. You w-would take the bed yourself?"
I'd rather have you in it.
