Page 16 of Sweet Revenge

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I heard Daemon knock again. By now, I’d calmed down enough that I wasn’t sobbing. Either that or my eyes had finally run out of tears. “Elisa? Can I come in?”

“Fuck off,” I told him.

He let out a sigh. “You need to let me in. We need to talk about this.”

“Not now.”

I heard him shuffle away and knew he needed to lie down. He’d just been shot, after all. He could go to the couch or another bedroom. I wasn’t done crying about my mother just yet.

He gave up for a little while, but within the hour, he was back. “Elisa, I know you miss your mother, and I’m sorry about that, but there are some things about what happened that night that I need you to understand.”

“And I need you to go away.” I swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand before plucking a tissue from the nightstand for the hundredth time and wiping at them. “Just leave me alone. You’re a fraud.”

“Elisa, if you don’t unlock this door, I’m gonna break it down.” He was starting to sound a little perturbed now.

For a moment, I thought maybe I should just let him in. But then I realized he couldn’t possibly knock the door down, not in the state he was in. “Go. Away. Daemon.” I gritted my teeth and bit out each word.

“Fine. If this is what it takes to prove to you how much I care about you, then this is what I’m gonna do.”

I heard him back up a few steps and was just about to say something in response when the door came crashing in, Daemon’s foot hanging in the air before he fell to the floor.

CHAPTER10

DAEMON

“Oh, my god, Daemon!” Elisa was by my side, hovering over me, covering her tear-streaked face with both hands. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her, gasping for air. It took everything I had left in my tank to kick in that goddamn door. I hadn’t counted on it also making me fall on my ass, but once the door came open, I went down hard. Now, I was struggling to draw in a breath, let alone get up off the floor.

She dropped down to her knees next to me, moving her hands down so I could see her beautiful face. Her eyes were red and swollen from so much crying. I’d really fucked up this time. I had no idea why I’d let that piece of information slip. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I’d just assumed she’d always known we were behind her mother’s murder. How could she not know? Her father knew, after all. Didn’t her brothers know?

I was trying to reason through my fuck-up, and there was no point in it. The bottom line was that she hadn’t known, and now she did. I couldn’t blame her for having such an emotional reaction, but I did need for her to understand a few things about what had happened between the two of us.

“We need to get you into bed,” she said, snapping out of whatever it was that had had her hating me a few moments ago and shifting into mothering mode. She would definitely make an excellent mother one day, and maybe that was because her mother had been so kind to her. I had no idea what that was like. Both of my parents were fucked up, though my mom had always been far better than my dad. It wasn’t saying much to call her the winner in that contest.

“I can get up,” I told her, but it wasn’t completely accurate. I let her help me move to a sitting position and then used the doorjamb to hoist myself off the floor, all the while relying on her strength. I’d had no idea she was muscular enough to chop wood, but I’d seen her doing it. And that axe throw at the end was stellar.

Carefully, we made it across the room to the bed, and she laid me down, murmuring about how she couldn’t believe I’d done that and how I was going to be the death of me. She opened my shirt and gasped. “Daemon! You’ve popped your stitches. There’s blood on your bandages.”

“Oh, I’m sure I just loosened them a little.” I smiled up at her, and she shook her head as she went about getting the supplies she’d need to clean my wound and rebandage it.

As she worked, I watched her, feeling her fingers graze my warm skin. She was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. And now, she was a captive audience. Sort of. The Elisa I knew wasn’t about to run off and leave me lying there with an open wound.

“You were gorgeous that night in the club,” I began. She sighed, closing her eyes for a second, but she said nothing. “I was supposed to distract you, but the moment I saw you, I knew I had to have you.”

Elisa pressed her lips into a thin line and looked at me, but again, she didn’t speak. She cleaned my wound and put some sort of salve on it.

“Listen, Elisa, you were the one girl I wasn’t supposed to touch. My father’s enemy’s daughter. Call it forbidden fruit, if you will.” With that, she arched an eyebrow at me, and I chuckled at how cheesy that sounded. “But you also just happened to be the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. So I took a chance and went after you. That night meant something to me, too, you know?”

She finished with the bandage and looked at me again. Still, her perfect lips didn’t part. I was wearing her down, though. The fact that she wasn’t screaming at me and hadn’t left must count for something.

“After that night, I wanted to go to you on more occasions than I could count. But why would you want to be with me? A fucking Petrov?” She grinned a little at that. I didn’t do a lot of self-deprecating, but when I did, I did it right. “We were enemies. You were Juliet. I was Romeo. I wasn’t ready to die just yet.”

“Are you now?” She rolled her eyes at me.

“I almost did,” I reminded her. I didn’t really want to get into the depth of my feelings for her at the moment. “I’m just saying, I don’t want you to think that I just fucked you because I had to. Everything that happened that night was my choice. And I did get your face tattooed on my arm so that I’d never forget it, so that has to be worth something, right?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly before getting up off the bed to put away everything she’d used to clean me up. I rebuttoned my shirt, waiting for her to come back to me.

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