Page 156 of Breaker

“Cora.” Breakers voice sounds like chipped ice. Hard and splintered. “Did Rune hurt you?”

Here’s the thing when men ask if you’ve been hurt. If you tell them yes, you’ve been violated, they question your perception. Was it that bad? Did you draw his eyes, his attention? What did you do? Did you anger him?

If you tell them yes, and you convince them that you weren’t the cause of being assaulted, you have to deal with their fury. It becomes so big, so all consuming, sucking up all air, leaving no room for your own. Their anger at your violation makes your rage so small.

The problem with Breaker isn’t that he won’t believe me. No. The problem is he will, he won’t even question it. Considering what he did to Zane for just trying to harm me, Lord knows what he’ll do to Rune.

And I can’t have that.

Not yet.

So, I meet his beautiful eyes, brush my thumb along the lips that have tenderly given me so much love and affection, and I lie.

“Rune didn’t touch me like that.”

Chapter 48

Delilah

My first body guardarrived at our house when I was eleven. I’d never had one just for me before. Any time I left the house, I was with my mother, so her guard was my guard. And my private school provided enough security, I never needed my own.

He arrived the same day as my mother’s funeral. The day was hotter than hell, even for mid-September in the southernmost part of the state, and the lace and satin black dress Clyde had told me to wear, stuck to my skin. I remember staring down at my patent leather shoes thinking that if my mom was here, she’d have wiped the dust from my shoes and told me to sit up straight.

So, I did it myself as we drove away from the cemetery in the heart of town.

Sit up straight, Delilah. And keep yourself together. If you’re a mess on the outside everyone will think you’re a mess on the inside too. People don’t trust a messy woman.

I had asked Clyde for his handkerchief in his suit pocket, and he’d pulled it out slowly, watching me like one would a strange, wild creature as I cleaned the dust from my shoes, then folded the fabric neatly and tucked it into the handle of the limousine.

My mother liked things neat and tidy. She liked sunsets and silky dresses. She liked sweet tea with cut up lemon tossed in the top. She liked pearls and lipstick and everything that was pure and good and she was taken from me by something I couldn’t even see.

A bullet to the chest, then another to the head as she tied my shoes outside the restaurant I insisted we went to. All because I was spoiled and wanted the tiny pizzas they made that night.

All because I was born into a family that thrived on violence, and she was forced to marry my father and have me.

All because he wanted her.

I know this because Cora’s mom said it once. Screamed it, in fact, over dinner one night while Cora and I were playing in the pool. Our parents had sat around the long table keeping an eye on us, drinking and laughing until something happened and Cora’s mom stood up and pointed at mine and said, “You only have what you do because Rune was so obsessed with you and paid your family to marry you.”

I never understood that statement until now.

How someone would pay a family to steal their daughter.

I was an only child. I didn’t have cousins, only Cora. We weren’t like the other families in my father’s circle, although I saw how my father’s associates married off their daughters, but I never thought twice about it.

It didn’t affect me, so I didn’t care.

Stupid, selfish me.

I care now. And I think about it constantly.

Cora’s parents may be dead, but their family name and their fortune is not. And Cora is the only one left alive, inheriting it all. The shares to Rune’s company, all her parents money and estates. And I’ve decided that when I return, it’s all going to be mine and Cora and all can rule over the company my father built, the one he trained me how to keep thriving when he’s gone.

Because my father signed his name on his death warrant the day he killed their brother. Reaper will kill him.

And I think he needs me to get close to him.

“You’re not paying attention, Kitten,” Reaper says, tapping my arm with his training knife.

---