Page 50 of Lock Up the Darkness

It had me sick and deeply disturbed that I was even having this sort of reaction.

“Fuck,” I muttered, chugging the rest of my scotch. Well, Asher’s scotch. It was the least he could do to make it up to me after what he’d fucking well engineered at my expense.

I focused on the burning pain as I gulped it down too quickly, futilely hoping that it would distract my mind from all the rest screwing me up inside.

“You all right?”

I spun from the bar in the salon to see Jonah striding on in.

He had a bandage wrapped around his right upper arm and his right palm. A white tank covered his previously bare chest and the bruising and scratches that he’d sustained from his interaction with Aurora. There was some blood in his hair too, from where she’d scraped her boot across the side of his head, according to his account of what had happened.

“Fine,” I muttered, turning from him and refilling my glass all the way to the rim.

“You’re upset I fucked her, huh?”

I stilled, the glass just shy of my lips. “You didn’t fuck her.”

“Finger-fuck then. Made her come, tasted—”

“Enough!” I yelled, before chugging half of my fresh glass of scotch. “I don’t need the details.”

“Then that would be a first for you.”

Fuck it. My fingers tightened to a white-knuckle grip around the glass, as I tried to contain the anger, indignation, frustration and whatever the fuck else was going on with me.

“Living the closeted life they’ve forced on you, you’re always beyond eager to live vicariously through me, reveling in every detail of my exploits.”

“You piece of—" I spun around… right into him, knocking up against his chest and spilling some liquid from my glass in the process.

He grasped my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Kill.”

“What?” I choked, the understanding bleeding from him pulling me up short and cutting into my barely-checked rage.

In that moment as I looked at him, his hand acting as a comfort on my shoulder, I realized he’d said all those things to get a rise out of me so I would actually let it out, and not bottle it up with every other thing like I usually did—like I usually had to do.

“Until I saw your reaction out there when you took me in, the state of me, the state of her, and realized what had gone down, I didn’t know you felt anything but animosity toward her. I should’ve. I should’ve seen through that façade with you. I know you better than anyone. I was so focused on Asher’s plan that I let it get past me.”

“I don’t… I can’t care… I can’t feel anything like that. Least of all to her.” I pulled from his hold, then knocked back more of the pricey scotch. “She owned me, for fuck’s sake. What kind of a fucking fool would I be to want her, to even see her in any favorable way, to damn well care that she was shattered by the betrayal we shoved in her face earlier?”

“Attraction isn’t rational or clear cut most of the time. Actually, in my experience, it’s a twisted little bitch.”

“Yeah, that makes it all a whole lot better,” I groused.

“You’re probably also drawn to her because she’s bottling up a lot of pain, just like you.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “What pain?”

He shrugged. “No clue. I just felt a shitload is all. She needed to unleash it real bad.”

“Well, she found her outlet in you,” I said with more of an edge than I’d intended to put out there.

Jesus, this woman really was in my head.

And elsewhere.

A shitload of places that I didn’t want her.

Yet another thing that was out of my fucking control.

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