I tell her the story. I shouldn’t, but suddenly I don’t want to stop. The way she listens is a kind of nourishment.
In those dark days I would sometimes think about her and me stretched out on the lawn under the badminton net, splitting apart blades of grass—it was a kind of happy place, I suppose. The boy I was back then needed the sympathy she’s giving me now.
But right here, right now, her sympathy is hell on the man I have to be.
“You did it. You survived,” she whispers.
“Survival isn’t amazing, Mira. People are animals in the end, and you do what you have to do to stay alive. It’s built in. Like breathing. You want to believe the best, but it’s a lie.”
She pushes my sleeve back up and rests a gentle fingertip on the burn spot, as if to heal it with her fucking sympathy. “Does it hurt?”
I close my eyes. The floor seems to dip beneath us. “Can’t feel a thing.”
A lie. Her sympathy burns more than that cig ever did.
She’s warm and soft in my arms. The sound of her breath fills my ears. Maybe it’s fear or maybe arousal. I can’t tell.
My mind crowds with images of her under me. Skin flushed. Hair spread around her head like a dark halo. That Mira gleam in her eyes. Mira was always up for a dare, always ready to go to the edge.
That’s probably how she likes to fuck, too. Adventurous. Daring.
I imagine holding her, filling her, feeling her. Connecting to that place deep down inside her where she knows everything’s a lie.
What’s happening to me?
Stop it.
I drag in the scent of her hair like a drug. It’s all I get. I’ve threatened to cut off her finger, for Christ’s sake. I can’t fuck her too. Sweat trickles down my spine.
“He must’ve felt awful when he found out.”
“What?”
“When Konstantin learned what he did.”
“Oh. He didn’t know.”
“Afterwards, I mean.”
“Why would I tell him?”
“You didn’t tell him about the burn?” She pulls away. “What? Like, not at all?”
“He would’ve just felt like shit.”
“So you didn’t tell him? It would’ve been an ungodly amount of pain.”
“It wasn’t like my leg got blown off. It was war, Mira, you don’t stop for something you can handle with a Band-Aid. I grew up different than you. You need to understand that. I’m different. I went somewhere you don’t come back from.”
She settles back against me, nestling into my chest and starts sliding that thumb back and forth again along the good part of my arm. The touch shudders across my skin.
Her voice is husky. “There’s no such place. Where a person can’t come back from.”
My heart pounds, and the way I’m holding onto her isn’t right. Like the twisted fucker I am, I pull her closer, up against my body for maximum control. It’s a hold for a hostage. With just a shift or two, it’s a hold for a lover.
I look at the spot on her hair where I want to press my face, overcome by the intensity between us, listening to her ragged breathing, feeling her gentle touch. If I were in the habit of lying to myself, I’d say she’s touching me because she wants to, like it’s not a self-soothing thing—or self-serving.
During those early days when we were on the run with nothing to eat, Konstantin would take me past restaurants and tell me to breathe in the smells. He lied to me and said that smells were just as nourishing as food if you really sucked them in. He actually had me believing it for a while.
We’d stand behind some of the nicest restaurants in the towns where we hid, me like an idiot full of longing, eyes shut, breathing in what I so desperately needed.
It’s what I do now. I suck in the scent of her and try to make that enough. I suck in the scent of her when all I really want is to bury myself in her. Lose myself in her.
Instead I’ll take her finger. I owe it to Kiro.
“You love the one who protected you,” she says. “You wanted to protect him back.”
“I would’ve died for Konstantin,” I say, breathing in her scent again.
She pulls away and looks at my eyes. “It’s what we do with the people we love.” She’s looking at me like she really wants me to get what she’s saying. “He can’t handle seeing my finger, Aleksio. You have to find another way.”
I stiffen, heart thundering.
“It’ll kill him,” she says.
“Are you seriously comparing me and Konstantin to you and your dad? Seriously? Your fucking father?”
She rises off my lap, alarmed. Her knees hit the coffee table. “Whoa!”
I grab her arms to keep her from going over backwards, but I don’t let go.
I hold her in limbo between falling backward and falling into me, a little off-balance. My cock is raging. My cock likes this.
That’s when the plan comes to me. A way I don’t have to take her finger. It’s twisted. It’s not the other way she would’ve had in mind.
But it’s another way all the same.
I tighten my hold on her wrists.
“What?” she gasps. She senses something.
Slowly I guide her down. Not into my lap this time, but down to her knees in front of me. Because I’m a twisted killer, and hell if I don’t want her mouth more than my next heartbeat.
She watches my eyes as I do it, comprehension dawning.
“You want to keep your finger?”
Her eyes fall to my cock, raging in my slacks. Her chest expands. She lifts her gaze back to mine.
I take it as a yes.
Not once has she thought about the pain of losing a finger; it’s all about Aldo not being able to handle it. The man who killed his best friend and didn’t have the stones to finish off the babies—not that I’m complaining.
She puts her hands on my knees, slides upwards.
My heart thunders, and my cock strains behind layers of fabric.
“You’re thinking maybe there’s another way.” She’s into it. That’ll change soon.
I put my arms out on the back of the couch like she’s some whore between my legs. My mouth goes dry as her fingers approach. “Maybe.”
This whole power play shouldn’t get me off, but it does. I love her on her knees in front of me. I love the wrong energy between us.
Mira’s skin looks flushed; for a second, I think she wants me. It’s as much of a delusion as smells being the same thing as a big juicy steak and a basket of garlic bread, but I’ll take it.
She slides nearer to my crotch. I suck in a silent breath as she makes soft contact with my raging erection. She scratches lightly with her nails and gives me a playful look. I give her nothing.
She cups her hand around it, a half-moon of pressure.
She undoes the button. She’s shit at working the zipper, breathing hard, now. She looks up and lets me hold her with my eyes, or maybe she’s holding me with hers.
“I knew you’d find another way,” she says.
I steel myself as she pulls my shirt up from my belt. She leans forward to kiss my abs, tits pressed on my legs. She’s whoring herself for a piece of shit, but the message gets lost in my mind, and all I see is that she’s the strong one. Between her worthless father and her, she’s the strong one.