Page 60 of Fight

Seventeen

P

I’d heard his question, even over my thundering heartbeat, but I didn’t respond immediately.

Instead I stayed still, thrilling in the feeling of Ioan’s softening cock as it slipped out of me, sighing as our combined wetness trickled down my thigh. Even after, I stayed, my chest pressed against his hard pecs, my arms wrapped around him tight.

He didn’t ask again, didn’t rush me, just held me in his strong arms, his thumb worrying a little path on my skin. I was in no hurry to move because I knew this might be the last time I got to feel him hold me like this, and I wanted as much as I could take.

Soon, though, too soon, I pulled away, moved until we were no longer touching. He frowned but didn’t pursue me, and any piece of my heart he didn’t already have became his. The sinking feeling in my stomach told me it would be his no matter what his answer was.

I locked my eyes on his and after a deep breath asked the question. “Ioan, do you deal drugs?” I asked.

“No,” came his immediate response.

There was no hesitation, no clarification, and I thought I would float off the bed from the delirious happiness that filled me. He reached for me then, held my chin in that way I would only allow from him.

“What else, P?” he asked.

I frowned, then breathed out again. My question had been the most pressing on my mind because so much weighed on his answer. Had he confirmed that deep fear I’d had, admitted to being a drug dealer, it would have broken me.

My next question would be far harder for him.

“Do you kill the men you fight?”

“Yes,” he said, again with no hesitation, no clarification.

I didn’t know what to say. A part of me had to have been expecting this. I knew what Ioan did, knew that even before me and Markov, his world was dark, violent. But to hear him say so…it shook something in me.

Not what it should have shaken.

I should have been horrified, disgusted, something that acknowledged the brutality and finality of his actions. Instead, my thoughts, my emotions, were frozen, and I only barely managed to get out the next question.

“And if you’d lost, if you lose…they’ll kill you?”

“Yes.”

His voice punched the air out of my lungs.

I should have been ashamed, should have at least spared a passing concern for those lives he had taken, but I didn’t, couldn’t. Maybe the people he killed were like me, caught up in circumstances beyond their control, meeting the unfair fate Ioan had saved me from.

How many times had I tried to picture it, Ioan killing innocent people, taking lives without care? In these last hours, more than I could count. Maybe I was naive, giving in to wishful thinking, but I knew that the people he’d faced were there of their own volition, choosing as Ioan had chosen.

They’d lost their lives, and as horrible a person as it might have made me, I couldn’t think of them.

All I could think about was him.

Each night when he left, I worried for him, doubly when I knew he was going to fight. But I’d never, not even once, thought he might die, thought that he was risking his life.

For me.

I didn’t notice that the first tear had fallen until he swiped it away, then did the same with the next, and the next. I kept my head down, my vision blurring, but when he caught one of my tears with his lips, I finally met his eyes.

The expression there was tense, almost worried, and my heart seized.

“I’m sorry. I know…” He trailed off, something I didn’t really remember him doing, and in the next blink, he’d set his face into a look of resolve. “It’s who I am, P. I don’t enjoying killing, but I’m not ashamed.”

I frowned. “What?” I asked, not understanding what he said, why he was so vehement about it. What did he have to be ashamed of?

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