Page 14 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

“And you can’t go back?” I ask, wondering where “back” even is.

She shakes her head, doesn’t say a word.

“Do you have anywhere else to go?”

She shakes her head again.

Fuck.I can’t play the hero to this little lost lamb.And yet, I want to.Which is inconvenient at best—and self-destructive at worst.

“Fine,” I growl. She looks slightly cowed by my intensity.“First things first… we need to get out of here.”

“We?” she repeats, dumbfounded.

I nod. “I can’t leave you walking the halls of a sex club on your own.”

Her expression screws up with distaste. “I didn’t mean to come in here. I didn’t know…”

“Well, you picked wisely. One of the most expensive of its kind in the country.”

She shudders. “It was an accident.”

“They didn’t teach you sarcasm where you’re from?”

“They taught me not to ask too many questions.”

I raise my eyebrows. That explains a lot. “In case we get separated out there, you go to Weston’s Diner. Corner of Las Vegas Boulevard.”

“Why would we get separated?” she asks, her voice turning panicky instantly.

I put my hand on her shoulder instinctively. “Because there’s a lot of people out there who want me fucking dead.” She flinches the moment I swear, but I keep going as though I don’t notice the tic. “Most of them have connections, and if they don’t, theyarethe connection.”

She looks at me with a baffled expression on her face. Clearly, what I’m saying is making zero sense to her.

When’s the last time I spoke to someone like her? Someone wholly untouched by my world and its schemes, its sins, its prices?

Aurora…She was the last. She was the only person I can remember who had eyes like that, pure and clear. The only person who—

A gentle flicker against my cheek pulls me back to the present. I realize that she’s cupping my face again.

The first time, she was asking for comfort.

This time, she’s giving it.

“You went somewhere dark,” she tells me bluntly. “I wanted to bring you back.”

Bring me back?Does anyone have that power?

But the way she’s touching me… Tenderness, mixed with comfort… I haven’t felt that in a long fucking time.

I didn’t think I ever wanted it again.

I jerk away from her touch. She recoils, her hand suspended in air for a moment before she lets it drop.

“Ozol will have put a hit out on me before he ran like the coward he is,” I say. “Stay behind me at all times. But if I tell you to run, you run.”

She looks terrified by the very notion of leaving my side. I glare at her, hardening my expression so she knows I mean business.

“Do you understand me? If I tell you to run,” I snarl slowly, “you…?”

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