Page 11 of Love's Ace

Like a blank slate, wiped clean of a red ledger for the first time in…

Fuck, how long had it been since I’d beeninnocent?Had Ieverbeen innocent?

I tried to surge up again, and this time it was a blade pressed to my throat instead of his hand on my shoulder. It forced me to still beneath the sharpness, because I could see it in his eyes.

He would kill me if he had to.

This wasn’t some hallucination; this wasn’t some bad dream.

This was real, and I…

“Who the fuck are you?” The question spilled like venom from my lips. If a tone could cut, I would have watched him turn to ribbons, watched the little red line stretched between us fall to the ground.

But the only thing that could cut was the blade against my neck, and the sharp sting of his violet eyes.

“I’m the person whoshouldhave killed you already.” He soundedfuriousabout it, and I wasn’t sure why. He had me tied down. He had a knife to my throat.

“So why aren’t you doing it?” Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to taunt my would-be murderer… but I didn’t understand hisexpression, or the way his eyes dropped to the red line shining between us.

When he lowered the knife and plucked at the edge of it with the dull side of the blade, I felt it tug somewhere deep in my chest. A gasp tore from my throat, so violent it ached, but with it came a surge of strength. The man above me wavered, swayed… and it was enough. I jerked forward and slammed my head against his full, pretty mouth and watched him reel back.

“What the—”

It was strange. The contact made my entire body feel like it was floating, but my anger surged just behind the wings of that warmth.

Then I could feel the same pain blossoming across my face. It didn’t make sense, so I jerked up again and sank my teeth into his arm. Maybe it was a childish way to fight, but I would do anything I had to in order to keep myself safe. I would do anything to get free—I didn’t let people tie me down.

I couldn’t do thisagain.

I—

A sear of pain tore through my arm in the exact place I’d bitten him, and another followed when his fist slammed into my jaw. My eyes went unfocused, but I didn’t miss the low groan that tore from his throat, chased by a soft curse of,“What the fuck.”

I yanked harder on my restraints and felt blood sluice down my arm. I’d torn my skin open, but the lubrication was enough to slip free, and I dove forward while my vision was still swimming. My hands around his throat sent another shot of soothing, perfect serenity through my mind, but I still squeezed, wrenching the life from him so I could relish the sound of him struggling to breathe.

And in the same instant, I felt my lungs constrict, my chest ache and scream for air.

Ifeltmyself trying to strangle him.

It made me throw him back, and the sound of him crashing against the wall wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the sound of him choking had been.

But… it felt like I was trying to kill myself when I did that. I was a lot of things, but I didn’twantto die.

Not right now.

Not when touching him let mefeelsomething that I’d never felt before.

Instead of trying to rush him, I ran for the door, but he was on me in a flash of motion and a flurry of feathers, and his hands pinning me against the wall sent another shot of cool relief through my body.

I stilled under his touch and looked up into wide, violet eyes and flushed cheeks. His dark hair was tousled from our scuffle, and the red marks on his throat looked like they might bruise in the shape of my fingerprints.

Good.

“Stop,” he snarled, but the demand in his tone only made me struggle harder. We didn’t know one another, but he was going to learn quickly that trying to tell me what to do was the easiest way to find yourself dead in an alley somewhere.

The only problem was, I wasn’t sure if killing him would tear me down into that darkness with him. I pressed my wrists forward experimentally, forcing the stinging cut on my skin to ache in his hold.

I hissed, and he echoed the sound under his breath.

---