Page 140 of Lawless God

“We’ve just been in a car accident.” She nuzzles her nose against my cheek. “Why do you still smell so good?”

I chuckle, cut off by the pain in my thigh when I start walking, holding both our weights.

“Do you know how many times I thought of killing you?” She keeps blabbering as I make my way to the kitchen.

“Do I want to know?”

“So many. Fuck, so, so many.” I drop her on the kitchen island, standing between her legs as I grab a spoon out of the drawer and drag the cake from across the island.

“So why did I not just let him shoot you?” she wonders out loud.

“You’re drunk, Kayla.” I think I’m a little drunk too, and I don’t really want her to stop talking. I just know she’ll regret it tomorrow morning.

“Chocolate cake tastes so good when you’re drunk.”

“Does it?”

She nods excitedly, stars in her beautiful green eyes when I open the box. As she licks her lips, I cut a spoonful straight out of the round cake.

“Say ‘ah.’”

For someone who can barely ever feel happiness, I want to understand what the fuck is going through my body when she opens her mouth and closes her tempting lips greedily around the spoon.

She talks as she chews, sending crumbs of chocolate on me. “Take your shirt off.”

“What? Why?”

“I think this cake will taste better if I can eat it while staring at your abs.”

For the second time tonight, I wipe my mouth with my hand to hide my dumb smile. I put the spoon down, then slowly take off my suit jacket, and unbutton my shirt. I fold it in two and put it on the kitchen counter.

“Happy?”

She gives me the spoon back and opens her mouth for more. My cock isn’t going to survive this. I cut another piece and push the spoon into her mouth.

“So happy,” she giggles.

She points at one of my tattoos. I have so many, they’re hard to distinguish, but the bleeding rose covering the scar near my heart is unmissable.

With a gulp, she licks her lips. “That’s a bullet wound.”

“Like the one on your arm,” I say. I noticed it years ago before going to prison, and she had told me about NSC coming all guns blazing into a Kings meeting.

I push my glasses up my nose. “Rose. She shot me.”

Her eyes widen. “Your sister shot you?”

I feed her a bigger bite. “It was a different time. We were young. Hell, she was too young to even know how to shoot and yet she had a perfect aim. I was the horrible brother keeping the twins from escaping Bianco’s house. So she took a gun and shot me. Aimed to kill. To this day, I’m not sure if she missed or didn’t really want to kill me.”

Kay blinks up at me.

“I was dead for one minute and twenty-five seconds. In the end, they managed to leave. I never told them I was forcing them to stay in that nightmare of a house because Bianco had showed me what he’d do to them if they tried to leave. I…” I run my tongue against my teeth. “I really didn’t want them to suffer the way I did. But they suffered in other ways. There was no winning, really.”

“There’s no winning with an abuser,” she murmurs. “Only once you escape, or once they’re gone. Even then. It always stays with you.”

We stare at each other in silence before I ask, “More cake?”

She nods, smiling. “More cake.”

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