I wonder if he dreams of her.
In the three weeks that’ve passed since Noctem, since the 6 took Ria and Sid and me and threw us to the wolves, he hasn’t spoken of her, at least not around me, save for once. He hasn’t really spoken much at all, period. He’s drank a lot and he’s always around, but he rarely…participates.
An orphan with an estranged wife, my heart aches for him.
We haven’t done what we did again since that first time, the three of us tasting each other’s hurts, and I know it would kill Maverick if we did. I know, too, that I can’t stop Lucifer’s pain. Neither can his brothers.
Only Sid can do that, and I’m not so sure she wants to.
The letters she wrote Maverick, echoing the pain she felt at cutting off Jeremiah, the boy she thought was her brother…they’re heartbreaking to read.
Mainly because I know how the story ends.
For now.
She hadn’t made up her mind in those letters. But when the 6 came for us, pawns in their strange rituals, she made a decision. She was paranoid enough about the taunts the 6 made to Lucifer of how she became his wife. Of how Lucifer forced their hand to accept her.
So when her worst fears came true and the 6 wanted to use her in their mind games, she chose.
She chose for herself, and for her and Lucifer’s baby.
I swallow down the lump in my throat and pull the sliding glass door open to go outside.
The words echo in my head, that one conversation where Lucifer brought her up:
“Is she still going to keep it?” he asked Maverick, his eyes on the floor, a beer in his hand. A week after Noctem.
I had been pulling cookies from the oven, and I forced myself to keep moving. To not make this harder than it might already be.
Maverick had cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”
“She didn’t say?” Lucifer pressed, his tone desperate for something. For any scrap of information. “Nothing at all?”
Maverick had sighed. “If she had, either way, I would’ve told you, Luce.”
Lucifer had been quiet a moment, and then he asked, in a voice so low I could barely hear him as I turned the oven off, “Will he hurt her?”
Maverick didn’t hesitate. “No.”
And that had been the end of it.
Outside in the warm air of March, I sit beside Maverick.
He wraps his arm around me, tugging me close and kissing my forehead. He smells like leather and I breathe him in.
“You ready?” he asks, his lips moving against my hair.
Dread coils in my stomach, but I nod anyway. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
“It’ll be okay, baby,” he assures me, pulling me into his lap, turning me to face him, his hands on my waist. “And afterward, we’ll go shopping and—”
I slap his chest playfully, shaking my head, my hair tumbling down around my shoulders. “I don’t want you to spend all your money on my wardrobe, Mavy.”
His baby blue eyes narrow and it thrills me a little, to see him look angry, but I know he doesn’t mean it. Not like he might have before. “I’m insulted you think your clothes would drain all of my money.” He bites his lip, eyeing the white t-shirt of his I’m wearing. “Although you look damn good in my clothes, so maybe we’ll skip the fucking shopping.”
He leans down, closes his mouth around my breast, over my shirt. My hands grip his shoulders as I throw my head back, letting his hands roam under my shirt. My nipples harden, and he groans, tugging on them with his teeth, using his hand to knead the other.
“Let’s go inside,” I say breathlessly, swatting his shoulders. “Your brothers are asleep right—”
“As if they haven’t seen two people fuck before,” he growls, his mouth still around my breast.
I laugh, shoving his chest and reluctantly, he pulls away, looking back up at me.
I trail my finger down the side of his face, over his tattoo.
He smiles up at me, and it’s real. It’s soft, just his lips tugging up at the corners, but it’s real. For me.
“Why’d you get this?” I ask him, rubbing my finger up and down the tattoo.
He cocks a brow. “To scare girls like you away.”
“Like me?” I didn’t expect that answer. My hand comes down to his neck, then over his shoulders as I massage him with both hands.
His eyes nearly roll back in his head. “Goddamn, that feels good.”
I dig my nails in instead and his eyes spring open, shocked. “You didn’t answer my question, Mavy.”
He rolls his eyes, but pulls me in closer, laying my head against his shoulder as he plays with my hair. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Girls like you. Beautiful. Smart. Good.”
I shake my head against his shoulder, my cheek moving against the fabric of his shirt. “I’m not good, Mavy,” I mumble against him.
He keeps stroking my hair. “You are, baby. You’re perfect. For me, you’re perfect.”
My heart aches with those words. “Then why would you want to scare me away?”
He cradles my head to his chest, one arm wrapped around my waist, holding me to him. “So I wouldn’t hurt you.”
I squeeze my eyes closed. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“Didn’t I? I’m about to take you from your mom—”
“Fuck her.”
“—and Con,” he says with obvious disgust, “and The goddamn Ark, and every other boy who ever laid eyes on you and wanted to make you theirs.”
“What about girls?”
He stiffens. “Them, too.”
That surprises me. “You wouldn’t want a threesome?” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I think about Lucifer and what almost happened between us and my body tenses.
Maverick is being gentle with me right now, but he isn’t always. And I don’t want him to be. He’s better, though, and so am I, and I guess that’s all anyone can really ask for from one day to the next. Better.
But his arms only tighten around me. “No,” he answers me. “No more. I own you, remember?”
I laugh against him, glad the moment has passed. It’s too nice outside, too beautiful for us to be angry. “I own you too, asshole.”
“You mean you don’t want me tracking down other girls in the woods and slapping the shit out of them?”
I push away from him and grab his face, squeezing his lips together. He still smirks at me, his beautiful eyes gleaming. “I’ll kill you, Mavy.” I lean down close, my lips over his, my voice soft. “I’ll kill you. And if you do what Sid did to Lucifer,” my eyes flick to the door at his back and his expression changes to something darker, “I won’t sit around and cry. I’ll fucking find you and kill you, and whoever you try and run off with.”
He laughs. “Such big threats for such a little girl, baby. I don’t think you’d have it in you to kill me.”
I roll my eyes and kiss him. He opens his mouth for me, his tongue claiming mine as he holds me close. When we finally pull away, breathless, he says, “Let’s go before I wanna fuck you and we wake the whole house up.”
Mom isn’t there when I leave, one single backpack packed up and thrown into the backseat of Maverick’s Audi, Come Thru playing through his speakers.