I spit on what’s left of him, my bloodlust still unfulfilled. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
Tightening my grip around the sword, I cast a glance toward the cabin door. I’m tired of waiting and watching from the shadows while she battles the light. Madi should know where she belongs. It’s time to remind her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Madigan
Appraising myself in the mirror, I run my hand through my sleek, chestnut bob. Another new style will take some getting used to, but a renewed shot at life deserves a brand-new look.
I’m trying. Fuck knows, I’m trying.
Two months has been long enough to deaden the worst of the nightmares, admittedly with the help of a shit load of prescription meds. The blackouts have stopped. Even the walls don’t bleed anymore. My past dragged me to the edge of a breakdown, but I managed to stop new cracks from forming before I became irreparable.
I breathed another sigh of relief after that piece of crap, Jackson King, moved across the state last month. His memory is already fading, as are the scars he left behind. I feel stronger. Hardened. No one would ever mistake the woman looking back at me above this bathroom sink for the one who walked out of that courtroom a poor, rejected, sacrificial lamb.
“He’s gone.” Drying my hands, I let out a resigned breath and paste on a plastic smile. “They’re all gone, including Luca. Get over it and move on.”
New Madigan doesn’t dwell on the past.
New Madigan goes on first dates with nice men that her roommate Grady sets up for her every Saturday night.
I open the restroom door, determined to give what’s-his-name at the table-for-two in the window a fair shot. I’m even considering—
Out of nowhere, a hand clamps around my mouth, pulling me back against a hard chest. There’s no time to scream. No time to react. Before I can form a coherent thought, another hand is wrapping around my waist and dragging me into a darkened alcove away from the chatter of the main part of the restaurant.
Life is the great leveler, I think wildly, as his familiar scent hits my senses.
Rich and earthy, like the ground we used to lay on together, swapping our prison bars for counting stars—all the while feeling something growing between our souls that reached far beyond the galaxies above us.
Some say it’s a rollercoaster... One minute you’re flying high, and the next you’re nosediving straight to the bottom. Broken and bleeding, you think the ride is over. But that’s the thrill. The goddamn paradox. Just when you least expect it, another twist takes you right back up to the top.
And here I am, facing another ninety-degree drop, staring right into a pair of devil-black eyes I assumed were gone forever.
“Luca,” I gasp out.
“What the fuck are you doing with that man?”
I wrestle out of his hold, which is a joke. He’s six foot four inches of solid muscle. Without his prison chains on, he could pin me against the wall, and I’d be a rag doll in his hands.
I grit my teeth as explosive memories threaten to overpower me. Spinning around, I shove my palm against his chest and stumble backward on my heels. “We’re toxic, Luca. We’re every torn-out page of wrong.” Hot tears blind my vision. “As far as I’m concerned, you died ten years ago. You need to leave right now or—”
“Or what, cara mia?” he murmurs.
“I’ll be making a call to Detective Hunter to let her know you’re back in town.”
I hope the words sound as bitter as they taste. I hope that hearing them cuts him with the same jagged knife that’s lodged in my chest just from looking at him.
He shakes his head slowly at my outburst. “I’m not going anywhere, Madi. You’ve been a bad girl, and I’m done waiting for you to remember all the reasons why.”
Another step back and my shoulders slam into the wall. “I’m not a bad girl anymore, Luca, I’m a free girl,” I counter weakly. “And trust me, I remember plenty.”
“Not everything. Not yet.” Luca wastes no time closing the distance between us, capturing my chin between his fingers, his forearm pressed hard between my breasts. “You’re not free, Madi. You’re so numb on prescription meds these days, it’s a wonder you can still feel anything at all.”
“I don’t want to feel.”
“That’s not freedom. Not even close. You throw that word around like it’s a right instead of a gift.” I try to pull away from him, but he tightens his hold, brushing his lips against my ear. “What did I always tell you?”
I want to fight him, but my limbs are numb. Having him this close forces me back to that cabin in the woods again. To a time that was just us—spinning the bad into hope, and our desperation into survival. “That you’d never lie to me,” I whisper, the words sounding as obscene to me as their truth.
His thumb strokes my lips, setting my whole body aflame. He’s wrong. I can still feel something. “What else?”
“But you’d hurt me if you had to.” I swallow hard, my confirmation causing his breathing to become hard and heavy against my cheek.
He brushes his fingers along my neck before closing them around my throat.
He’s not hurting me.
Yet.
And that yet is what I hate. Because it’s the thrill that lurks in the darkness.
I feel his lips curve into a smile against my ear. “You look sick, Madi. You should excuse yourself and get into a cab before you cause someone to catch their death.”
“You don’t intimidate me. Not then. Not now.”
“I’m not trying to,” he says, still sounding on the verge of laughter. “But I can.”
“I hate you.” At least those words held a dirty conviction.
His lips twitch from suppressing a smirk. “No, you don’t. You hate yourself because you want to hate me. That part of you that’s still good is screaming at you to knee me in the balls right now, but you won’t. Because there’s another part of you that belongs to me, a part I darkened with a taste of vengeance so sweet ten years ago that it hungered for more.”
“That’s not true,” I rasp.
“Lie to yourself all you want, but I won’t. We’re more than soulmates, Madi. We’re life and death mates. What we survived... What we did to survive... It made us fucking unbreakable. You’re mine, as much as I am yours.” His gaze dips to my mouth again. “And as much as you tell yourself you don’t want me to take you right here against this wall, you don’t mean it.”
He’s right. The man standing in front of me is the boy I once loved, all grown up.
My first kiss. My first stomach-clenching orgasm. My first fuck...
“I won’t let those sick bastards steal it from me, Luca. It’s mine to give, and I choose you over them.”
I slump against the wall, desperate to sink into it. Because the alternative is to sink into him, and I can’t. Not again. I won’t survive it. Neither of us will.
Closing my eyes, I let out a shuddering breath. “You used me to beat a murder charge that you were falsely accused of, Luca. I broke all the rules for you. You won. It’s over.”
“Over?” His dark chuckle skates up my spine and breaks into jagged shards of warning. Leaning down, he gently kisses the corner of my mouth just before pressing a foul-smelling cloth over it. “Not this time, cara mia... This time, it’s only just begun.”