Page 1 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
Chapter 1
Pierce
Iwake on my back with Laura breathing into the notch between my collarbones, her hair a death shroud on my chest, her thigh knotted over mine like we’re less lovers than drowning victims entwined beneath the ice. Early morning in her bedroom, always the borderland between dream and threat. You don’t know how close you are to dying until you hold her. That’s not exaggeration or metaphor. That’s what Laura is, or what her life means for mine.
If I want to be poetic, I could say the winter light drifts in gray and spectral through her brownstone’s frostbitten windowpanes. But the truth is it’s barely enough to see by, just a filthy wash over the rumpled bedsheets and the half-naked bodies of us—her, warm and animal in her sleep, me, edge-tensed and always on the verge of bolting.
I lie here and listen to the slow-creeping breaths of her. The way she inhales, lips pillowed on my sternum, you’d think she was content. That she wasn’t capable of murder with a hairpin or driving a knife into a carotid in the middle of a dance floor. They don’t know her the way I do. Not even her father.
No. Especially not Laura’s father.
She stirs. The muscle in her thigh flexes, and her hand, slack at first, slithers under my ribs. She’s got the animal grace of something wild left inside too long. “You’re awake,” she says, voice thick with sleep-smoke and zero pretense.
I should answer, say something soft, but I’m overtaken by the urge to memorize her—the sharpness of her cheek on my chest, the tilt of her chin, the wolf-pale band of scar across her collarbone I trace in darkness when she dreams. If I closed my eyes now, I’d see her exactly: the way her hair tangles when she sleeps, the outline of her hip against my lap under the sheets. If I closed my eyes now, I could almost believe in a world where we don’t have to stash our love like it’s a body in the river.
She opens her eyes, lashes fluttering black against her skin. It’s hard not to look away. I don’t, and she smiles. “What?” she murmurs, and her hand travels up my chest, nails tracing a path I try to ignore.
“Nothing. I just—” I shake my head. “I could watch you forever.”
“You’re a liar, Landon.” She laughs against my skin, a little hollow, a little haunted. “You’re always thinking about how to leave.”
I want to protest, tell her how wrong she is, but Laura’s mastered the art of the preemptive strike. She nips at my skin, hands on either side of my face, kissing me with that slight air of violence she saves for the things she loves most. And yes, she loves me. But even love is weaponized in this bed.
She climbs astride me, straddles my hips, and pins my wrists like she wants to wring confession out of muscle and bone. It’s always this way: she covers her fear with force, always the aggressor, always the first to suck venom from the wound. She pushes my arms overhead, tongue flicking over my jaw, and I can smell her hair in the heat between our bodies. Her perfume, shadow, bergamot, and gun oil.
And for a beautiful moment, I am no one but hers.
This is what it means to belong.
But I fear nothing lasts, especially not with Laura.
She pulls back to look at me and her eyes, God—wide and mournful as a war widow’s. She looks at me like I’m already gone.
“Stay a little longer today?” she whispers, a question barbed in the flesh. “You always run.”
I draw her down to me and press my lips behind her ear. “I have to be at the courthouse. Judge Varga would have my head.”
“Let me have it first.” Laura bites me with a flash of teeth, her hand sliding down over my chest, slow and deliberate. “Don’t talk about court. Don’t talk about anything except this.”
I don’t. I let her set the pace, slow and grinding, her hips a metronome of I-need-you, I-hate-you, I-own-you. I let her ride me until the sheets are sweat-wet and her knees dig bruises into my ribs, until I can barely remember why I’m ever anywhere but here. I let her fuck the thinking out of me.
After, she collapses on top, boneless and gasping, face buried in my throat. I hold her. She’s trembling, and for a second I think she’s just cold, but I feel it: the stutter in her breath, the wetness against my neck. Laura Stasio, queen-killer, weeping into my skin.
That’s the trapdoor in her. You think you’re the only one terrified. You think you’re the victim.
I hold her tight, hand running over her back, and say, “You’re safe, you know.”
She laughs, a strangled sound. “No one’s safe. Not from him.”
She means her father. I don’t answer because there isn’t one. We’ve had this conversation dozens of times, and it’s always a stalemate. I want to believe I could save her, that I could build a world unrecognizable from the one her father rules. But the truth is I’m a coward. Every day, I’m terrified he’ll find outhow deep this goes, how there isn’t any part of me that doesn’t hunger for her.
She pulls up, wipes her nose with the heel of her hand, and smiles in that way that’s all smoke and mirrors. “You want coffee?”
I nod. She climbs out of bed, naked and unselfconscious, crosses to the window. She stands there a moment, just looking at the street, outlined in pale half-light. The taper of her waist, the knot of violence in her calves—I try not to watch, but it’s like being compelled to witness a car crash. You don’t want to, but you can’t look away.
She turns with arms crossed under her breasts, and for a second, she is just a girl in a cold apartment, hair in her face, eyes too big for her skull. “We could leave, you know,” she says. “Just go. Disappear.”
I want to, more than anything, which is why I shake my head. “He’d find us.”
