Page 107 of Things We Burn

I flexed my fingers so I didn’t put my fist through a wall.

I left Avery sleeping. She’d looked exhausted, so I didn’t want to wake her. She needed the sleep. I’d battled over waking her up to fuck her last night, knowing that she was tired, that she hadn’t been sleeping well—you could see it on her face. But my worse nature, my baser needs had overridden whatever shred of good was left in me. So I’d fucked her again, until she’d moaned for me, came for me then drifted off to sleep with my cock still inside her.

Yeah, she was fucking exhausted.

She hadn’t even twitched when I’d gotten out of bed and gotten dressed this morning.

“You found her,” was my brother’s greeting.

Avery was getting ready, though it took everything I had to let her walk out of that kitchen wearing my shirt without claiming her

She’d walked in, barefoot, still hazy with sleep—I’d never seen her sleepy, and damn, she was fuckinggorgeoussleepy—wearing my tee, the fabric straining over her stomach. Her perfect, round stomach. Holding our baby.

Yeah, after she walked over to me, so uncertain, nervous, kissing me. After tasting her, I’d wanted to take her on the kitchen fucking counter. Claim her all over again. But there was no food in the house, and she’d barely eaten last night. I needed to feed her. Feed both of them.

The feel of that pressure against my hand, harder than I’d expected, much harder... In all honesty, it had freaked me the fuck out, feeling it at first. I’d worried for Avery, that it must’ve hurt her. But she hadn’t seemed bothered. The opposite, actually. All of the tenseness leaving her face when she kicked last night, a lazy contentment washing over her. Love. It softened all of her hard edges. And I hadn’t thought my woman could be any more stunning.

“Found her,” I agreed.

Knox had been the one to track her down. He’d done it in less than five minutes. I was sure it was through less than legal means, but I didn’t give a shit. My brother lived his life how he lived his life. If he was ever caught doing whatever shit it was he did, he would get a fuck of a lot longer than five months in prison.

He wouldn’t get caught.

And he’d die rather than be incarcerated. I knew that. He’d been in contact the second I got out. I knew the reasons behind him not being there for the trial—his specialty was not manipulating the justice system. But he had managed tomanipulate the prison hierarchy to make sure no one so much as looked at me the wrong way inside.

“Good,” was all he said.

My brother was a man of few words and not a romantic by any means, but I knew he liked Chef.

“She’s pregnant,” I told him.

I heard his swift intake of breath. From a man who was not easily shocked. He hadn’t dug that deep, then, hadn’t hacked into medical records. Hadn’t thought he’d needed to, maybe.

“It’s mine,” I continued.

“Of course, it is.”

Again, a small inkling of what Knox thought of my woman. He knew she wasn’t about to jump into bed with someone else while I was locked up.

I remembered accusing her of it belonging to someone else. As much as I was mad at her, she didn’t deserve that kind of bullshit.

I cracked my neck. “Brax told her I didn’t want it. Her. Asshole told her I said to get rid of it.”

Brax didn’t reply right away, but I could hear him breathing.

“You want it to look like an accident?” he asked. His tone was casual, deceptively calm. But I knew him, could feel the undertone of rage.

Not just rage. Killing fury. We dealt with our childhoods in very different ways, but both avenues fed that desire to dance with death. Mine was just on motorcycles, snowboards and whatever else I could find.

Knox’s way of dealing was through literal death. Although I’d never flat out asked him, I knew my brother had killed before. Regardless, I didn’t consider him a murderer. The people whose lives he ended must’ve been the worst of them. Must’ve deserved it.

My brother had had it worse than me. He protected me from a lot of abuse that scarred not only his body but his very soul.

He’d kill Brax. He’d do it for me, and it would never tie back to either of us. He wouldn’t lose sleep over it either.

Though I ached for the man responsible for the pain behind my woman’s eyes to stop breathing, I needed to face him first. Feel his bones crush under my fists.

“I’ll deal with it,” I told Knox, hearing the shower turn off upstairs. “Just get him here.”

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