Page 17 of Ripped Lace (Ripped Bratva)

“Not really,” she replies. “I don’t think I’ll ever feel better again.” She wraps her hands around her body and hugs herself. “I can’t believe this…”

“Which part?”

She raises her troubled eyes to mine. “I brought Theo back here because I thought it was the only way to give him safety and security. I brought him to them, Phoenix.”

“Why did you come back here?” I ask, fully aware that I might regret asking at all. “Why here, of all places?”

She looks down. “I had nowhere else to go. I left the duffel bag at the mansion and… well, all the money was in there. It made me realize that without Charity, I was helpless. So I came to the one place I knew would take me. I came home.”

Guilt for casting her out of my home claws at my chest. “This is home? Even after what you did?”

She shrugs. “What does it matter? They allowed me back in.”

“On the condition that you marry the rapist?”

She sighs. “I had to provide for my son.”

“You told him he was the father, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fucksorry,” I scoff. “I hate that word. No one uses it right.”

My eyes flicker down to her breasts. I can see only the tops of them in the cups of her bra. But it’s enough to make me hard.

“Phoenix,” she says, reaching out as if to cup my face.

I turn away under her hand and she drops it immediately, her expression going slack with disappointment.

“I know you don’t trust me,” she says. “But I have nothing to do with Astra Tyrannis.”

“A number of other sources disagree.”

She pauses and seems to reconsider that topic of conversation. “What are you going to do with everyone else here?”

“That’s not for you to know.”

“If it concerns my parents and me, I think I deserve to know.”

“What you think you deserve is immaterial,” I snap. “I’m not interested in right or fair or moral. I just want my fucking revenge.”

Her eyes go damp with sympathy. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through. Losing you wife, your son—”

“There’s no need to speak of him.”

“How old was he?”

“I’m not talking about this, Elyssa.”

“Phoenix, please,” she begs as I stiffen. “I… I care about you—”

“Don’t.”

“It’s the truth. I can’t seem to stop. Trust me, I’ve tried. And I think that deep down, maybe a small part of you cares for me, too.”

She twists in my arms to face me properly. I feel my body go hard. Not just my cock—the whole of me. Every cell in me responding to every cell in her, no matter how hard I try to resist it.

“I just want to help, if I can…”

---