Page 51 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
“The answer to all that is no,” Ryan says. “Now get on board, Angel, because this train has already left the station.”
After a long time, I manage to speak. “Who told you how much the necklace was worth?”
He sighs like I’m the biggest idiot who’s ever lived. “You have a bad habit of focusing on all the wrong things, you know that?”
I blow out a breath and close my eyes because my clomping heart is making me dizzy. “That’s an amazing offer, cowboy,” I say in a strangled voice, “but I can’t leave with you. It would be a death sentence for someone I love.”
He’s quiet for a moment, stroking a thumb over my earlobe, then he presses the softest of kisses to my jaw. “Mariana, I can help you. That isn’t bullshit. It isn’t ego. It’s the truth. I’ve got a team of badass motherfuckers trained by the United States military in heroics and general mayhem who can be here within hours to back me up. We’ll get your people, and then we’ll get the fuck outta Dodge.”
“There’s nowhere I can run! They’ll find me!”
“Who will?”
I open my eyes. Ryan stares down at me with dangerous intensity burning in his gaze. It breaks my heart how serious he is about helping me.
He doesn’t realize I’m a lost cause, or that I’ve already got one foot out the window.
“The monsters.”
“Not if I get them first.”
I want to scream in frustration. “You don’t understand—”
“So educate me.”
“I can’t!”
“You keep sayin’ that word. Like you forgot you have somethin’ called free will.”
“Free will is for people who haven’t sworn blood oaths to—”
The bitter words die in my mouth. Horror at my blunder rises up in their place. When I look up at Ryan, a wolf is looking back down at me.
“Blood oath?” he repeats, deadly soft. “We talkin’ Cosa Nostra? The Sicilian mob?”
My entire body breaks out in goose bumps. “No,” I say firmly.
His laugh is short and dark. “Oh, okay. Sure. That was totally believable.”
I turn my face to his arm and close my eyes again, cursing myself for my stupidity and him for seeing through me like a pane of clear glass, which no one—with the possible exception of Reynard—ever does.
“So this is good. We’re makin’ progress! Now all you gotta do is tell me who else we’re takin’ with us and—”
“Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
I swallow a sob. “Make it sound like a hypothetical. Like it could actually happen. I stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago.”
Ryan takes my face in his hands. “Maybe they didn’t stop believin’ in you,” he says softly.
When he kisses me, it’s like a promise. Like he’s making a blood oath of his own.
This man is going to be the death of me.
I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him back with everything I have, my heart shattering into a million jagged pieces.
Because his kiss is a promise, but mine is a goodbye.
