Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(74)

“Why?” I asked breathlessly as I pressed my head back against the wall. The room was spinning so beautifully that for a moment, I thought I had orbited into the cosmos, but his words quickly yanked me back to earth.

“Because I am ruinously in love with you.”

Everything stopped. The spinning room, my beating heart, the earth’s rotation around the sun…

What the hell did he just say to me?

“And I fear it may very well be the end of me—something I cannot allow to be.” He swallowed down hard as if trying to entomb his words, his truth. “But I could not lay it to rest until I said it out loud, just once, where you could hear the words and know that I am not just a monster, but a man telling a woman that he loves her.”

My brain felt as though it had short-circuited. “You…love me.”

He caressed my cheek with his hand as his eyes softened in a way I had never seen from him before. Adoration. Desire. Helplessness. They all stared back at me through his eyes, and then just like that, they were gone.

“Forgive me, angel,” he pleaded as he shuttered himself off from me. “You mustn’t remember any of this.”

Panic knotted my stomach. “Please…don’t,” I begged, knowing what was coming next.

I didn’t want to forget this. I didn’t want him to take my memory away. He had shown me his true colors tonight and they had come in all shades of red and black and all of the darkness in between. And then for the rarest and faintest of seconds, he allowed me to glimpse into his heart, to see him as he was, and now he was going to take it all away.

“You can’t…do this,” I sputtered, fighting hard against the weakness. “You don’t have the right.”

“You will not remember any of this when you leave this room. You slept peacefully through the night and dreamt of wonderful things that freed your heart of pain…” His words crawled through my mind like soldiers overtaking their enemies as I drifted further and further away from this moment.

And just like that, victory was claimed.





32. PUSHBACK


I woke up the next morning feeling incredibly rested. I’d slept right through the night, and for the first time in, well, as long as I could remember, I hadn’t been plagued by nightmares. After grabbing a quick shower, I changed into a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt that Dominic had graciously stocked the guest dresser with, and then headed downstairs.

Trace, Dominic and Gabriel were all seated in the kitchen talking, though the quiet chatter immediately stopped as soon as I walked in the room. I wasn’t so much surprised as I was irritated by it.

“Don’t stop on my account,” I said, crossing my arms as I watched the three of them from the entrance. “I’m sure you have plenty more important details about my life to share with each other.”

“Are we still on this?” grumbled Dominic as he took of a sip of his drink—something way too dark to be apple juice. He was gazing out the window, his eyes aimed in the direction of his mother’s garden, and consequently, away from me, which was both unnerving and strange.

Trace pushed his bowl of cereal away as Gabriel set the newspaper down on the table. Obviously, they knew it was about to get as sticky as molasses in here.

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I boring you with the whole five minutes I’ve had to process this?”

“Yes.”

“Dominic.” Gabriel reproached his brother and then shook his head at him, a silent warning to tread carefully.

Too late.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You are utterly heartless, you know that?”

He mumbled something under his breath, but I didn’t waste time trying to decipher it. His hardened expression told me everything I needed to know. At least Gabriel and Trace had remorse in their eyes, at least they cared that they’d hurt me by not giving me the entire story about my mother. But not Dominic. Nope. He was entirely unapologetic and unfeeling about everything he’d ever done to me and this time was no different. And I was sick and tired of it.

I stepped into the room, my arms still folded rigidly against my chest. “It must be nice going through life not giving a damn about anything or anyone else but yourself.”

“It has it perks,” he answered offhandedly.

“Like screwing over your friends and not giving a single crap about it?”

His eyes snapped to mine. “I don’t have a single friend in this world and that’s precisely the way I like it.”

I flinched at his words, at his disregard of me and everything we’d gone through together. Not wanting him to see the hurt he’d inflicted on me, I quickly steeled myself. “Thank you for reminding me of what you are, Dominic.”

“And what might that be, angel?”

“A callous cold-blooded liar.”

He tried to laugh it off, but there was a tenseness in his shoulders that gave him away. “I am a lot of things, angel—vile, unholy things—but a liar is not one of them.”

“More lies from the liar,” I spat, purposely poking the wolf.

“Tread carefully, little lamb.”

Scowling, I took another brazen step forward. “Or what? You’re going to lie to me some more?”

“I already told you, I did no such thing.”