Page 80 of Deadly Oath

He snarls out the last word, and I flinch back, but I hold his gaze.

“I’m telling you no,” I say softly. “And if you make me, right now—if you force me to fuck you, you’re no better than those men that hurt your sister. You’ll be just like them. Is that what you want, Kian? To become the same thing you’re trying to get vengeance over?”

I see the moment that the words cut through. He lets go of me abruptly, stepping back, and I sag against the lockers, my heart in my throat. “How the fuck did you know where to find me, anyway?” he growls, his voice raw and angry, and I swallow hard.

“Your sister.”

He lunges towards me again, stopping just short of grabbing me, but he’s caging me in once again. “You’re lying,” he hisses. “Ailin doesn’t speak any longer. I told you that, but you must not have been listening, princess. Too busy worrying about your own skin. She hasn’t since?—”

“Since she was brought back. Iwaslistening,” I snap back. “She wrote it down. She said she was sure if you just got back, and you were in a bad mood, this was where you’d be.”

Kian sucks in a sharp breath, and I can see him struggling for patience. “And how thefuckdid you get to talk to my sister?”

I wrench away from him, backing up to get some space. As furious as I am with him, as hurt and betrayed, as much as I wonder now if I’m starting to hate him as much as I was starting to fall in love with him, being so close to him has an effect. His body, his scent, the muscular looming weight of him, the blood and sweat—I can feel desire prickling over my skin, distracting me, and I back up further, glaring at him.

“She found me. She wrote down that she heard us shouting. She came up to see who the woman was that he brought home. She was curious about me. About why I was there.”

For the first time, I see something approaching fear in his eyes. “Did you tell her?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. Not for your sake, but hers.”

He visibly relaxes, although I can still see the anger on his face. “How the fuck did you get out of the house? I have guards everywhere, specifically told to keep youin—” He pauses. “Ailin. Of course. She’s always been a genius at sneaking out. Drove our parents bloody nuts when we were young.”

I nod. “She showed me where the cameras wouldn’t see me. Sweet-talked one of the drivers into bringing me here. Promised we were just having a spat, and you’d be happy to see me.”

Kian’s jaw is still clenched, but I can see him softening as I talk about his sister.He loves her,I realize.Truly loves her.It doesn’t excuse the horrible things he’s done to me, the lies and betrayal—it doesn’t excuse everything he still planned to do, but I can see that this rage, this need for vengeance that has driven him to do something unthinkable spread from a wound caused by a deep love for his sister. An infection that took hold, driving him mad.

I don’t think he was always like this. I think, maybe, that the man he was before all of this happened to Ailin would be horrified to know what he’s done.

“So you came here to see me—why?” He crosses his arms over his bare chest, and I try not to notice the way the muscles flex and ripple as he does. “To convince me to let you go? To shout at me? To tell me what a horrible shite I am for what I’ve done?”

“I think the first is pointless,” I say quietly. “To the second two—yes, and yes. But also, to get answers.”

Kian’s eyes gleam with fresh anger, as I give him something to latch onto. “You’ll get no answers from me, princess, not until I decide?—”

“Ailin wrote down that my father was involved in this. In me nearly being sold. Is that true?”

I say it so baldly that I think it catches Kian off guard. He goes very still for a moment, and then he nods, a quick jerk of his head.

“Yes.”

That one word feels as if it goes through me like a shot. I feelmomentarily dizzy, and I grab onto one of the lockers, steadying myself. It feels incomprehensible. My father loves me. He always has. I believed, with everything in me, that the only reason he hadn’t come after me was either because the FBI had told him not to, or because he couldn’t find me. He was a good father. I knew he cared about me, loved me—or at least I thought I did.

But—I remember other things, too. When I was nineteen, a powerful man from the New York Bratva came to visit—twenty years older than me. I still remember the way he looked at me, the way it felt as if his eyes were crawling over my skin. I remember that, over dinner, my father told me that there was a possibility we would be engaged. That it would expand his territory into Manhattan. That it was good business.

I was even willing to consider it, until the man followed me after dinner, when I went to freshen up. He pinned me in a hallway, his hand finding its way under my skirt. Only one of my father’s men, sent to look for me when my father suspected something, stopped the man from taking more than just a quick feel from me.

My father was wise enough to know what might have happened that night, and he sent someone to stop it. But it didn’t stop him from trying to arrange a marriage with that man. No matter how I begged, no matter how many times I told him I couldn’t bear it, that I knew my duty but desperately wanted it to be anyone but him, my father told me it was business. That if the man agreed, I would be his wife.

The deal fell through. But it wasn’t my father’s doing. It was that other man, who found a woman even younger, who he wanted more.

I believe that my father loved me. But I also believe that there are reasons he might look past that love. That even what he felt for me would always, always be overruled if it was good business.

Kian shrugs. “You don’t believe me. It doesn’t matter to me if?—”

“I didn’t say that,” I interrupt him. The dizzy feeling has faded, and now I just want to know the truth. I want to know if what I believed all my life wasn’t as true as I thought it was—just like so many other things now, it seems.

Kian frowns. “Then what?”

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