Page 101 of Brutal Knight

“You wouldn’t.”

“Oh, what? You’re going to say it’s true love? Give me a fucking break. That won’t change anything.”

“You know, we don’t have to listen to this,” Aiden says, gesturing at Edward’s head. “I can think of two ways we can get him to shut up. One of them is a permanent fix.”

I know what he means, but I don’t want to do this with Willow in the room.

I know she’s not weak, but I don’t want to put her through anything else. I don’t even know how much hell she’s been through now. For all I know, Edward’s spent the last hours doing nothing but using her as his personal punching bag.

“This isn’t a joke,” I tell him, my voice low. “So shut up.”

Edward just shakes his head. He’s not even listening. He knows he’s backed into a corner.

“She’s useless anyway,” he says raggedly. “She can’t even bear your brats. Fucking Dmitri wouldn’t stop bitching about it. He wanted to return her after he found out she was defective. Idiot didn’t realize that’s why I made the contract so binding.”

It takes a second for the words to process, and when they do, I’m left reeling, shocked into silence.

Defective?

What is he talking about?

CHAPTER38

Willow

I can hear the sound of my own breathing, the rushing of my blood in my ears. It’s so quiet, so still. There’s a ringing in the air from the guns that are now silent.

I hear every word perfectly clearly, enunciated and cold. I hear the one word I couldn’t say.

Defective.

I never wanted to tell Connor. I was terrified. I was scared to tell anyone, really—especially before. When I was weak.

If I couldn’t do this one thing, I was useless. I was an addict, an abused wife, a powerless pawn used in mafia men’s games. I had no control and no use aside from my body.

And even that was broken.

So, I didn’t tell anyone. Of course, Dmitri was the one who figured it out in the first place, but he wouldn’t tell either. It was the one thing he never spoke about to his men or anyone else.

Why would he? I was an embarrassment. A bad investment. He chained himself to me, and then he found out I was useless to him. I couldn’t be stuck at home to bear his children, to bring his future into existence for him.

So he took away mine.

When Dmitri found out I couldn’t have children, he became even more violent than he’d been before. He took his anger out on me in creative ways, in ways I’d never wish on anyone else. He threw me around the house, doing everything short of breaking a bone or killing me. He wanted me to hurt.

When he was angry and drunk one night, he shoved me against the wall and whispered in my ear.

I wonder if I could fuck you until you break. Or until you work again. Might as well try, right?

It was the least of the things he did to me.

I knew when I met him that Connor would never do anything like that. I knew he wasn’t Dmitri. With every day I spent with him, I knew he’d never hurt me.

But despite knowing he wouldn’t hurt me, I couldn’t help fearing that I’d be hurt. That the real pain would come from the way things would change.

After all, he took a risk when he took me in. He sacrificed so much of his life and time to help me get clean. He even married me to save me from Dmitri’s legacy and secure the Ravens.

He never pushed, never demanded that I give him anything in return. He didn’t demand my body.

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