Page 71 of The Carver

“Is he still in the business?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m guessing he’s operating his business against your rules?”

“Yes.”

I nodded in understanding. “That’s complicated.”

“It is complicated. I have to stop him—but I can’t kill him—and he fucking knows it.”

“Do you think he’s the one who…who tried to kill you?”

“No.” He didn’t have to think twice about it. “But he knows who did.”

“And he won’t tell you?”

He shook his head.

I thought I knew Bastien before tonight, but now I saw him in a whole new light. “What’s his name?”

He looked at me again. “Godric. And I’ve spoken of him enough for one evening.”

I could tell how much the strained relationship bothered him. How much it got under his skin and bubbled to the surface like a painful welt. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.” His beautiful eyes looked at me, open and vulnerable, completely transparent.

“How—how many people have you killed?”

He continued his stare.

“You don’t have to answer that question if you don’t want to.”

He considered the question in heavy silence, the seconds ticking by. “I can’t give you a hard number because if I kill someone, then they mean nothing to me, and I don’t remember people I never cared for. But it must be close to a hundred if I had to guess.”

I swallowed at his body count—hisactualbody count.

“They were all bad men, if that makes it better.”

I’d seen the way he’d taken out those guys in the restaurant with ease, even though he was outnumbered. He didn’t need a gun when he was a killing machine.

“Does my answer bother you?”

“No.”

“It seems like it does.”

“It doesn’t,” I said. “It’s just a lot to take in.”

“Thank you for not judging me.”

He was a criminal warlord who had danger inked in every one of his tattoos, but I found him to be the kindest, most wonderful man I’d ever met. “I could never judge you.”

Chapter 12

Fleur

My heart was in my throat, and I couldn’t swallow it back. I was normally calm and collected, but I was in such an unstable period in my life that I wasn’t ready to make a good impression on anyone.

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