Page 69 of A Bond with the Dark

“It doesn’t make sense!” Claire responds, shrugging. “I mean, they were good-looking. We probably would’ve hooked up with them if we had gotten drunk enough.Whatis that?”

“It’s part of their prowl,” Dom answers, pulling a thread on the couch cushion. “They like the hunt. They live for that rush. It’s what men like them do. They have women throwing themselves at them all the time. Getting girls is easy for them. It’s the ones that are passed out, and they can do whatever they want with that turn them on. I’ve known guys like that. I’ve kil—” he stops himself.

I look at him with a frayed sense of curiosity at what the end of that sentence would be.

“I’ve beat up guys like that before. I have sisters.”

Okay. He almost said kill, but he means he would have killed them if they had messed with his sisters.

Right?

Fear needles at the back of my neck.

“I know my brothers would’ve killed them tonight,” Claire says quietly. It seems the two of them are on the same page.

I don’t know what page I’m on. I’m all for justice. Eye for an eye. A bully to the bullies. But there had been so much blood. And so much strange fog surrounding the night and the events that I keep returning to what Quinlyn said.

There’s a darkness about him. When he stormed off to take a shower, there was an affronted dignity in that gait, something that tells me he was tortured by what he had just done but had done it all the same. A shade of emotion hangs on him that doesn’t exist in this reality.

Claire stands and straightens her dress. “I think I’m going to bed.”

“Goodnight, babe,” I say as she bends to hug me.

“Night,” says Dominic, extending his hand out for her.

She takes it and squeezes. “Thanks again, Dom. I know that Anna will be appreciative in the morning.”

He nods, and I shift, pulling my legs under me and grabbing a throw pillow.

“Are you angry?” he asks when Claire’s gone.

“Not angry, just—surprised, I guess.”

His eyes linger on mine for a moment and then drift off someplace, I know not where. There’s such a haunting look on his face, a look that tells me he’s adrift somewhere in his misery, and in that moment I want to hold him. I want to be drifting with him in that vast dark ocean, should it mean he doesn’t have to drift alone.

“Hey,” I say and rub his back.

The tortured, brooding look in his eyes reveals to my soul that he wants to share something with me; he wants to reveal a secret so big that it may change the way I look at him.

“Sayah, you are my everything,” he says.

I did not expect that. I can tell what it cost him to admit that to me at such a moment.

“You are my everything, too, Dom.”

He is becoming much more than I ever thought he would become. Maybe now he’ll be able to share his secret with me.

This may be the beginning of that story that the medium had begun to tell.

With that, the last of my anger folds within itself and disappears.

I stand up and walk him to the bedroom, where we collide passionately and break the bed even more.

In the middle of the night, I awake to Dom not being in the bed next to me. When I sit up to look around, I see him on the balcony in the moonlight, admiring the city.

He’s shirtless and has on only his boxers. The tattoos that cover his arms and chest are also covering his back. His legs, too, are sleeved.

It’s fucking sexy.

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