She hadn’t placed my hand on hers because she needed the support or she couldn’t do it on her own. She’d done it because we belonged together. Because everything that we did should be a team effort, a partnership with her as my equal.
It made me want to see her on her fucking knees.
Rafael and Calix stayed at the warehouse with Ryker, working to get a location for Murphy from the remaining victims we’d managed to take alive.
I guided Irina back out of the freezer, grabbing one of the jars of eyeballs and handing it to her. She looked down at them, leaning up to touch her lips to mine gently. “If you think I give a flying fuck about these eyeballs right now, you haven’t been paying attention, Paolo,” she murmured, touching her bloodstained hand to the side of my neck that wasn’t freshly inked with butterfly tattoos. “I love them. I love that you did this for me. But you need to take me home. Now.”
I guided her out to the SUV and put her in the passenger seat, then climbed in and drove it back to the safehouse in near silence. My hand rested on her thigh, the warmth of her body sinking into me through the jeans she’d worn for the torture chamber at the warehouse.
Blood stained the denim, my fingers sinking into her flesh as I gripped her. The monster in me wanted to pull over on the side of the road and sink inside her with the blood of our enemies still covering our skin.
The most brutal part of me wished she hadn’t washed Darragh’s blood off of her, wanting to fuck her in the savagery she’d shown when she cut through his dick and ass.
Only the lack of safety kept me going, kept me driving when her knowing green gaze turned my way, a sly smile curving her lips. The winding roads that led to the safehouse seemed to carry on forever, all the while with that grin toying about my butterfly’s mouth.
“I’m going to fuck that look off your face, cuore mio,” I said, filling the silence of the car with my voice as I turned up the long, dirt driveway.
“I hope the fuck you do,” she said, the challenge in hers rising as she met my gaze.
She threw open her door the moment I shifted the SUV into park, waiting for me in front of the house as I stalked around the side of the vehicle.
Taking her hand in my grasp, I pulled her in the front door as the security at the house opened it. Our bedroom didn’t offer the kind of privacy we were used to, too many people crammed into a house until we decided what to do with living arrangements.
Somehow, I suspected the rest of them had already gotten used to knowing their friends and family could hear them fucking the night before.
Surviving made the blood pump. Killing made the heart race.
Having a wife to come home to at the end of it all meant a man needed release, needed to find comfort and warmth inside her body to know he was still human after all.
I pulled her through the empty living area, making our way to the relative privacy of our bedroom and going straight through to the bathroom.
I’d wanted to fuck her with both of us drenched in blood, but something about seeing it on her hands felt wrong. Knowing she’d already given so much for that girl…she didn’t get to be a part of this too.
Turning on the shower, I shifted my attention back to my wife where she stripped her stained shirt over her head.
“Did I tell you to take your clothes off?” I asked, stepping closer to her and touching a hand to the fingers that fumbled with the button on her jeans.
She stared up at me, green eyes darkening as the question rolled over her skin. “No.”
“Then why are you?” I lifted my hand from hers, touching fingertips to her bare nipple. Grabbing it between my fingers, I pinched and watched her mouth drop open. Releasing it, I enjoyed the way it puckered for me, craving more of my touch. “One day soon, we’re going to pierce these,” I said, ducking my head down and running my tongue over it.
“Aoife says it hurts,” she said in a moan, making me stop and look up at her.
“I didn’t need to know that about Aoife,” I said, shaking off the confession that would rock Yavin’s world when he discovered the truth. Between that and the tattoo she’d gotten and hidden until their wedding night?
God fucking help him.
“Sorry,” Irina said, her voice trailing off into a giggle that I disrupted by pinching her nipple between my teeth.
I still hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t devoured her with my mouth. As much as I wanted to worship her and be grateful that she was alive and mine, the moment when she’d tried to leave me still hung heavy between us.
The truth of our history needed addressing, and she needed to be punished for thinking that she could ever be free of me.
“You can take off your pants now, Butterfly,” I said, my head already filled with visions of her wet ass jiggling as I spanked her red for what she’d tried to do.
She listened, her eyes on mine hesitant as if she could sense the tension thrumming through me, the barely restrained rage. She unfastened her pants, shoving them down her thighs and stepping out of the shoes to kick it all to the side. Standing naked in front of me, my butterfly didn’t show a moment of being self-conscious.
She didn’t shield the bruises littering her body from her fight with Darragh, standing proud of the fact that she’d overcome those injuries and lived to tell the tale.
If her only regret was that Madison hadn’t lived to suffer through the rape and violation she’d condemned Irina to? Mine was that Darragh wouldn’t live out the next thirty years in a cage with a spiked rod shoved up his ass.
I stripped off my crusty, blood-stained suit, shoving the layers onto the floor to deal with later. They were ruined, the entire suit needing to be turned to ash alongside the bodies.
I held out a hand for Irina, guiding her into the shower and watching the water cascade over her head and shoulders. The water ran red as the remnants of Madison’s blood washed free from her skin and hands, fading down the drain in a pink swirl.
She was clean by the time she turned to face me, her skin luminescent in the light coming from the fixture outside the shower stall. “You were going to leave me,” I growled, the warning making goosebumps rise on her flesh.
She looked down, fiddling with her hands as she thought of a response. It didn’t matter that she had every right to be upset. It didn’t matter that I’d kept a very vital secret from her, because I wouldn’t do anything differently if I could go back in time. That secret had made her mine.
That secret had allowed her to let down her walls and let me into her heart as well as her body.
That secret had given me everything.
“You hurt me,” she whispered, the admission rocking me back on my heels. I paused there, staring into the vulnerability on her face—the hurt she didn’t want me to see.
“And I’ll do it again,” I admitted. “I have no idea how to be your husband. How to be honest with you but still protect you from the realities of my life. You can’t run away every time I fuck up.”
“You killed my fucking mother!” she yelled, the noise bouncing off the shower walls as I stepped into the space and closed the glass door behind me.
“She was a shitty mother! She abandoned you long before I fucking killed her. Do not act like I took her from you. She willingly walked away,” I said, my voice deepening as rage came with her ridiculous notion that I’d cost her anything.