Page 30 of The Boss
Her breath shuddered. She didn’t argue. Didn’t speak at all. Just stared back at him, wide-eyed, shaken, while the Brand pulsed hot in both palms as if sealing the claim.
He didn’t let go of her hand. He turned her palm over, studied the lines as if the Brand had written a message there he could decode if he stared long enough. “When it burned into you,” he said, softer than before, “what did you feel?”
She swallowed. “Heat. And… certainty.”
“Certainty of what?”
“That I belonged to you.” The confession came out barely above a whisper. Her lashes lowered, as if the truth embarrassedher.
Something inside him answered to that, something old and territorial. He dragged her palm to his mouth and pressed his lips to the center of the lion. The mark went molten against his tongue. She gasped. It seared his own hand at the same time, the two Brands echoing like struck bells.
He tested it. He brushed the lightest kiss to her Brand and a match flared in his. He nipped, gentle, and a spark shot up his arm and into his chest. He lifted his head and found her watching him like he’d just done magic. Maybe he had. Maybe the Dantes had never told the Severins that the Brand was not only ink. It was an instrument. Awire spliced between two bodies.
“Lie to me,” he said quietly.
Her eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Tell me you feel nothing.”
She didn’t. She told the truth. “I feel you.”
He nodded once and then did what he’d never allow another soul to see. He tested himself. “I feel nothing,” hesaid.
The Brand punished him. It bit like a live wire. He hissed and she jerked, eyes goingwide.
“Leif.” Her fingers closed around his hand, panic flaring. “Don’t do that.”
He stared at their palms, at the way their skin flushed where lion met lion. “So it hates lies,” he said, voice gone gravelly. “Good. That saves time.”
She was quiet a long beat, studying him like she was learning more than he said. “You wanted to know who I was running from,” she murmured. “You pulled it out of me. But what about you? Who are you running from?”
“Myself,” he said without thinking, and the Brand stayed quiet. He almost laughed. “And my father. Or who my father is.”
Her gaze sharpened on that, but he didn’t let her chase it. Not yet. He wanted the bloodlines settled in his head. He wanted the calculus of this night to addup.
“Your father,” he said again. “If he’s not a Dante, not a Jones, then what does that leave?”
“A man with too much power and too little conscience,” she said. “A man who owns things he shouldn’t own. People he shouldn’t own.”
His spine straightened. “And your brother is his?”
“Yes.” The word was a thread. “And so am I.”
He parsed that carefully. “Full brother, or half?”
She lifted a shoulder, that tiny defensive movement he was learning to hate because it meant retreat. “Half.”
“So, despite that, he thinks you’re his responsibility.”
“He thinks I’m his possession.” The words had iron filings in them. “I’m not.”
Leif believed her. He’d already seen the way she refused to bow, the way she met his stare and didn’t look away when he used the voice that made grown men forget their names. She wasn’t tame. That was one of the million reasons he neededher.
He slid fingers into her hair and guided her closer, not a kiss yet, just the pressure of his mouth to her temple, the long inhale of her scent. The night had her on it, and soap, and the clean heat of his shirt. The very human urge to take her to bed seized him, to ruin her for anyone else, to leave his mark in places only his hands would ever see. He didn’t. Control was a religion with him and he didn’t break faith easily.
“Why did you go to the Alabaster alone?” he asked against her skin. “If your brother was there.”
“I was supposed to meet someone who could help me disappear.”
