Page 70 of Reaper
“You did.”
“And I’ll do it again if that’s what it takes to get that Triad pretty boy out of your head.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. And if you play your cards right, I’ll even let you eat my pussy. But only if you play your cards right, Reaper, because I swear to all that’s up there listening in heaven, and all those listening down there in hell, that if I have to keep hearing you go on and on about your new boy-toy, I’ll — ” She pulls the car up to the curb and turns it off. The door slams behind her. I exit, and she’s still going. “I mean, the fucking nerve. Falling in love with that guy — and maybe you’ll just call it a ‘bromance’ or whatever, but I know the truth — was not part of the mission parameters. Your job was just to hang out in the bathroom, wait for him, do some light flirting, and get his phone number. Not, like, get so deep with this guy that I have to worry that I’ll soon be seeing his name tattooed on your asscheck.”
“I’ve already looked up the Chinese characters. I think it’d look good on my left cheek,” I say.
She grumbles and slams the door of the apartment complex behind her with extra vigor. “And that’s not even the worst part. You want to know what the worst part is? Do you, Reaper? Or do you just want to keep staring off into space and imagining your lips around Yichen’s dick?”
“Oh, Yichen…”
The elevator’s out. She roars and stomps up the stairs. “The worst part is that I know you’re fucking with me. I know it. But it still gets under my skin because you’re under my skin. I know there’s no logical reason why you’d run off with some young gangster wearing a suit that’s a little too big for him, that makes him look like he’s some fucking schoolboy at his confirmation wearing his older brother’s hand-me-down suit, but still —fucking still— it gets to me. It grates at me. It’s like nails going up and down my spine, pausing at every fucking vertebra to tap out the rhythm of ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ by the fucking Baha Men.”
“That’s a good song,” I say, unable to add much more as I walk up the stairs behind her, eyes firmly planted on her ass, thoughts split between her curvaceous figure and whether, once all this is over, if I should hit up Yichen to go to a Lakers game.”
She stops mid-step, whirls, and glares at me with a gaze so sharp it’s a wonder I don’t start bleeding on the spot. “Fuck you. I fucking hate what you’re doing to me right now. Hate it.” She turns, steps off the staircase and onto the hallway leading to our apartment. Still ranting, hands gesturing like she’s punching the air. “I can’t believe I’m letting you do this to me. I can’t believe what I’ve got myself mixed up in. I can’t believe how I fucking feel about this — and I meanfucking feel— because it’s this feeling that burns through my goddamn blood. There were all these times I wondered how it is my sister became an addict, how she didn’t see what was going on with her life, what she was turning into, but now, now I think I have a feeling. An understanding. It’s a fucking rush and a nightmare and I hate it and I hate you…”
“Hate me?” I say, pausing just long enough for her to whirl and glare at me again. Fuck, the way her eyes burn with anger, and the mind-blowing sex that often comes with that ferocious, vengeful anger, it sets my blood on fire better than anythingI could ever jab in my own veins. “Well, thanks for being so fucking open about it, and if that’s how you feel, I’m lucky I got Yichen on deck.”
“On deck?On deck?” Her voice burns, but she doesn’t turn around — she buries her fist into a wall. She pulls it back without flinching, without shaking out any pain, and continues walking. This isn’t the first or even the thirtieth time she’s punched a wall. “How can you just fucking say that, Reaper? And even though I know you’re just fucking with me, it still pisses me off, it still gets under my skin, it still makes me want to rip your fucking face off and dip your large, fucking magnificent cock in turpentine and set it on fire.”
“Seems a little fucking extreme.”
“A little? A little? That’s the least of what I want to fucking do to you. I want to bash your head in right now. I want to see how deep down my throat I can shove your cock. I want to wake up next to you in bed, slap your stupid fucking face until you wake up, and then I want to ride your I want to ride your face until I’ve orgasmed so many times that I experience the legitimate fear that I might have used up my body’s capability to have any more orgasms.”
She’s tense — beyond tense, she’s a spring so tightly coiled she’ll either explode or she’ll implode into an anger-and-sexual-frustration-induced black hole — and I revel in it. Her tension, her anger, her out-and-out ‘I want to beat the shit out of you and fuck your brains out’ ferocity.
“You sound stressed,” I say. “Maybe take a breath. Calm down.”
“Calm down? Calm down?” Her right eye twitches. “Oh, fuck you.” She turns away and resumes her walk. Our apartment is just a few doors away. At the entrance, she stops, looks back at me, and her eye is still twitching, while her hands are clenched tight into fists. Adriana Ruiz is a legitimate, lethal threat, and Iwouldn’t have it any other way. “Do you really want to know why I’m so pissed off? Do you want to know why I could handcuff you and murder you and leave your body in the desert for whatever vulture doesn’t mind your sexy, bruised, handsome, irritating-as-fuck remains?”
“Why?”
She slips the key in the lock, releases a long sigh, and turns. The door opens. “Because I think I might fucking love you, Reaper. I think I love you, and it scares the fuck out of me because I’ve never felt this way about any man before, and often, not even about myself. You’re in my fucking head, and I feel like I’m losing it. I love you.”
Those words open something inside me, letting loose feelings I’ve kept contained because of guilt and a ghost, and I look her in her burning, bright eyes, and I say, “I love you, too.”
“Good. Now, don’t give me any more of this Yichen shit today, or else, I swear, it doesn’t matter how much I might love you or how good it feels when I look in those eyes of yours, I will cut your head off and use it as a fucking penholder on my desk. It shouldn’t be too difficult to make it happen, considering it’s already fucking empty. Goddamn it, you piss me off so much. I love you.”
She steps into the apartment, and I follow. She’s still mumbling and muttering while hunting for the light switch. I fight back my laughter — she said it first, she said those words even while wanting to decapitate me, and it feels damn good to know that these feelings between us might be real.
A flash of movement, nothing more than a sense of a shadow moving with something even darker in its center, is all I see before a bag drops over Adriana’s head and cinched tight by a pair of hands wrapped in black leather gloves.
She screams. “What the hell?”
Even bagged, she lashes out with a fist and connects with the face of a large, broad-shouldered man wearing a black ski mask.
I step forward, fists raised, ready to throw myself at the man attacking Adriana. I have to save her, have to get her out of here.
I make it two steps before something heavy comes flying at the side of my head from the darkness to my left. A fist, as heavy and large as a goddamn bowling ball. It cracks the side of my skull and sends me stumbling to my right.
A thud jars through every bone in my body as I hit the ground. Shaking my head, I get to my hands and knees before a boot comes in from my right side and takes me in the ribs.
Then another.
And the fist that knocked me flat earlier hits me again, delivering a blow to the right side of my face that makes bright, black shapes pulse and explode behind my eyelids.
