“SHE DID IT,” he utters, sensing me or hearing me as I press my shoulder to the bedroom wall, having searched the entire mansion for him after he left and now find him in a strange room that smells of perfume. “She did everything they accused her of and more.”
Wariness ripples through me.
As he moves around the all-white and grey bedroom, his gait is slow—meaningful. Two walls have 3D embossing—geometric patterns in the white plaster. No room in this house is boring and flat. They all have dimensions.
He scans the lavish space, looking at nothing and everything as though for the first and last time. I came to tell him he hurt me, but find him suffering more pain than I’m in.
He stops by the closet door and runs his palm down the red material of a dress hanging on the door. It’s her dress. I can tell by the fabric, the column style.
I try to keep my breaths shallow, concerned my panting will stir, awaken, or spook whatever dark entity is circling him. “What happened tonight?”
“She confessed,” he hisses out, stopping to touch a bottle on the bedside drawer. His touch is stiff. “To beating my brothers,” he continues. “To despising them.” He winces. “Christ. She hated them. How did I not see that before?”
Past tense—hated. “Hated?”
I hardly have the will for words, feeling his testimony on his tongue, hearing it in his deadly timbre, seeing it before me as he touches things, his fingertips collecting memories.
“She was the informant, sweet girl. She told Nerrock—your father—that his son wasn’t his.”
Rounding the bed now, he stops. He sits on the edge, facing the door and stares at me frozen in the jamb. I straighten under his gaze.
Where is she?
Clay makes a pyramid with his hands, resting his fingers on his lower lip. His gaze is vacant.
A swamp of darkness moves across his eyes, growing the pupils until nothing but thin rings of blue remain.
Where is she?
This is where she was staying, but it’s after midnight and the house is quiet. Even the halls were empty of house staff. I blink at him.
My heart tells me to go to him, cradle him, kiss him, use my voice, but something stops me.
He eyes me. “She… was responsible for it all. She was the reason Konnor was locked away. The reason Dustin loathed us… but she was still my mother, little deer. Just like Jimmy, I had affection for her.”
I swallow over the lump in my throat. Past tense—was. “Was your mother?”
“Yes,” he says, a chilling utterance that slithers inside my ears and delivers the answer without further words.
Yes—was.
“She asked me to dispose of Konnor,” he states adamantly. “She wants the bastard gone.”
“Oh my God,” I gasp. Wrestling with my feet, I will them to move towards him. They do. Taking me closer, steady and slow, and I feel the way he tracks my movements.
He is too still now that I am closer, as though he is unsure whether it is safe for him to move. “She told me to make my sons hard,” he mentions, emotionless.
No. “No,” I say, taking another small step, my eyes unwavering from him. “Don’t do that.”
Heat radiates from him, hitting me from across the room as he says, “I killed her.”
I stop mid-stride, my tippytoe on the floor, my heel raised, my pulse screaming through my veins to use that foot to run away. “Clay.”
“I killed her,” he says again, each word punching the air. He starts to vibrate with rage, his eyes locked on mine, his anger brewing. “I made the tough call,” he preaches—chants—a line from a book or story, and not his own natural words. “I weeded out betrayals. I made her liable. I protected my brothers. I—”
I cover my mouth, gaping at him over my hands. He shoots to his feet, lunging for the bottle by the bedside, hurling it at the wall, the pieces shattering, the crash echoing down the hall.
I jump back.
He doesn’t stop. He reaches for another, pelting it at the dress he fondly touched earlier, breaking the canister open, spilling its contents all over the fabric.
He finds another.
Then another.
Another.
And as he breaks the room apart, he breaks apart with it. Glass shards everywhere. His body shakes. Exploding bottles. He growls through clenched teeth.
But I’d walk through glass and fire and smoke for him. Through debris and ash. I have. I will again. I take a step towards him.
He freezes for a moment. The destruction stops. He clenches his fist so tight his shoulder muscles bunch and bulge. Grow. Demonically. The strength in them protrudes from his suit. “Fuck!”
It hurts. God. “Clay,” I reach forward, but he raises his hand to stop me. It hurts to see him so volatile and yet— I can handle his evil. I said I could. Tears find their ways into my eyes for him—not her—always for him.
And I know I should keep my distance, but I’m not afraid of my everything even as his evil spills across the room.
I walk towards him. He stays in one place, holding himself together, eyeing me from the side, panting like an animal barely restrained from a carnal urge.
I reach for him, dragging his thick defiant arm down so he can’t block me with it. He twitches when I place my hand softly on his chest, his eyes snapping to me, pinning me in place with a warning. I gasp on a breath but stay close to him.
I can be what he needs. “I can handle your evil, Sir.”
His jaw works. “No. I don’t want that. Leave.”
“I can share it with you.”
“Stop.”
“You don’t have to make the tough calls alone anymore.” On my tippytoes now, I lean up and touch his jaw. The muscles beneath pulse angrily, pressing back at my palm, pushing me away. “You are not alone.”
“Stop it,” he growls, staring sideways at me. “I did this. I planned Jimmy’s execution. I ordered Dustin’s. I may not always thrust the knife, but I damn well make the call. I’m— I’m fucking… losing it.” His neck is tight, ridged down the column.
I stay slow and tender, contradictory to his stiff and burning hot. “You’re not alone, Clay.” I use his name, articulate it, make sure he hears me. Clay.
He smiles bitterly, shaking his head. “A leader is always alone, Fawn.”
My name… I try to smile at him because he’s so beautiful and I am so proud of the man he is for his family. He is breathtaking even when he’s breaking down the centre, even as he loses all his classic control. And just like the rose needs the thorns—pretty things need ugly defences. The thorns need the rose to reproduce, to keep existing, to spread their roots and ground them. “We can lead together.”
He closes his eyes on a sigh. “Impossible.”
“Why?” I ask, and his gaze finds mine, settling in deep. “The thorns need the rose too. I can raise your children,” I state. “I can love them. I can love you too. And your brothers. I’ll be here for them, and we can heal this family together. Don’t you believe in me, Sir?”
As I stroke upward towards his chiselled jaw, he snatches my wrist. I gasp but refuse to break eye contact with him, even as he bands the small limb.
He glares at me through his lashes, his chin high, his lips a straight cut across his face. “I killed my mother.”
I nod—small. “I know.”
“I drugged her. Suffocated her,” he bites out, provoking. “Que will find her in the morning. Stage everything. Clean this room. It’ll be an overdose. I’ll get away with it. Like all the hundreds of others. Hundreds of deaths.” He squeezes my wrist. “At my hands. And my brothers can never know the truth. This is my evil. Do you understand? Mine. Do you understand what this life is with me, sweet girl?”
My lungs strain. “My life.”
He frowns. “You think you can handle that?”
I look at his hand cuffing my wrist. “I can.”
“Don’t be what I need right now,” he says, releasing my wrist as though I burn his palms, scorch through his muscles with my resilience, overpowering his brutal hold. “Not after what I just did—’
“I’m not hurt by that anymore,” I admit, understanding him and the moment, understanding his bite, his need to taunt me with the evil inside him. He was taunting himself.
“That was careless. Selfish—”
“No. It was honest. Real. And you want me to be appalled by it. Shocked. You’re pushing me away even though you would never let me leave. What you don’t realise is… I can handle your evil, Clay.”
Lifting to the tips of my toes again, I place my palms on either side of his neck and kiss him gently. His lips are tight, ready to hiss. But I find a groan in his mouth and when he accepts my tenderness, I fill his clenched kiss with a moan of my own.
I break away from our kiss, leading my lips down his throat. Nervous, never having done this before. His hands come to my hair, gripping me hard, with meaning and acceptance.
With need.
The harsh skin on his jaw chafes my lips in the most amazing, painful, and violent way. It matches his energy, and the way I am willing to suffer it for the taste of him.
“You needed me,” I say against his skin. “You said so yourself. I can be what you need, whenever you need it. I can be the right woman for you, Clay Butcher. I can be your pretty little queen. Let me.”
He pushes me from his neck, ripping my lips away and bracketing my face for his harsh perusal. He stares down at me. “But you’ll still be my sweet girl.”
I pant below his deadly blue gaze. “Yes.”
He bristles. “You won’t become cold.”
“No.”
“A statue,” he mutters, and then bites out, “Dammit, Fawn. You’ll play with your kitten! Blush when you touch yourself. Suck my cock to sleep. Look at the goddamn moon, and hang a dreamcatcher over our son’s bed!’
I feel the tears rising, finally attuned with why he doesn’t want me to handle his evil. Why he keeps me at arm’s length when he’s consumed by dark dealings. He doesn’t want me to change. I am already the right woman for him. “Did you think I’d just change all of a sudden?”
“Evil can change the very fibres of us, little deer.”
“But we know evil, Sir. We know pain. Trauma. For people like us, only love can change our fibres,” I counter, holding his powerful blue gaze with my own. A smaller body in front of him. But a strong heart, a gentle touch, a submissive and a brat and his little deer. “And so much more, little deer.”
I continue, “We didn’t grow up in the cotton-wool love other children had. We didn’t have love coming and going from people who filter in and out. We didn’t have unconditional love from a mother.” I hold his pained gaze. “Our love is like a cocoon, Sir. It only happens once, and the effect is irreversible.”
Months ago, I came in search of a dangerous man. I found the Devil’s prototype in a flawless dark suit. With clear-blue eyes and dark hair, an aura larger than life and a kaleidoscope of colours—I can see it today, Mum.
A man who kills brutally, fucks territorially, and hides his emotions deep within layers of smooth control. He is the Don of the Cosa Nostra. Evil. Beautiful. Ruthless.
But he’s not the villain of my story.
He is my everything.
