Page 26 of Marked By Blaze

“Did it feel good? Sending that animal after me? That fucking beast punched me in the face and threatened to kill me if he ever heard a peep from my apartment.”

“Ingrid—”

“You were the one who threatened James to turn off his music.” How would he have known the music was an issue unless… Unless he’d been in my apartment. “You fixed the hot water and the faulty light bulb and replaced the leaky faucet,” I say, more to myself than him.

He freezes, his expression turning blank, and I can’t help but chuckle at my own naivety. How in the world did I think my notoriously lazy and cheap landlord would take money out of his own pocket to fix anything without a threat to involve the housing authority? Maybe a part of me wants to believe that is the case. I closed my eyes to the fact that everything started working magically when I met this man. I could have warm showers, use the light in my closet, have my favorite breakfast delivered to my door every morning, and enjoy the peace and quiet of my home.

“Ingrid—”

“You only knew what I liked because you were stalking me. You were too far away when I got brunch with Jade to know what I ordered.”

Blaze takes a step forward, and then another until he’s caging me against the sink. “Listen to me, Ingrid. I did what I did to take care of you. I love you—”

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. Tears well in my eyes, but I don’t let them fall. “You don’t expect me to thank you for stalking me, do you? For breaking into my house and violating my trust like this? How am I supposed to trust you now, knowing what I do?”

How can I move past this? Sure, he didn’t break in nefarious intent, but I question if it should make a difference. The eyes I’ve felt watching me this past week…. I wasn’t imagining it.

God, I just slept with my stalker. And then I fell in love with him!

Chapter Eleven

Blaze

I have declared that I would first kill someone before I let them come between Ingrid and me, but what I never anticipated was for that person to be me.

I dropped my guard. I was careless and became too comfortable too soon.

And now I’m back in the shadows, watching the girl of my dreams move on with her life without me. She looks miserable, or maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe it’s both. Ingrid always looks put together, but there is something off today as she walks from her building. She turns and looks around, but I know she can’t make me out from my spot. I’ve always been good with hiding, following well-trained men through the city without being spotted.

“Leave, please. Just go.”

I close my eyes against the painful memory of her last words to me. It’s been a little over forty-eight hours since she asked me to leave her apartment. Maybe if she’d yelled at my face, cursed me out, then I would have found a way to get back into her good graces, but she’d looked at me with those beautiful eyes crowded with tears and begged me to leave.

I left, but staying away is a whole different story.

How can I?

There is no way in hell I can go about life not knowing where she is and whether or not she is safe. What happens if some guy gets cocky, and there is a repeat of what happened in her apartment hallway the other day? I would never forgive myself if something ever happened to her.

When she’s sure no one’s watching her, Ingrid sighs and walks on. It feels like a knife in the heart when I realize she’s back to hiding too. But instead of sticking to the shadows like me, she hunches her shoulders and makes sure her hair covers her birthmark. She had just started to come out of her shell, and now she’s dived right back into it.

I follow her to her favorite café, but she doesn’t walk inside. She stares through the large windows for a solid minute before walking on. The next café is one block over, and she enters that one, ordering an entirely different breakfast. I watch through the window as she toys with her breakfast sandwich before tossing it away.

Fuck!

It chips at me seeing her like this. Knowing that I caused her hurt by betraying her trust. Fuck, I am doing the same thing now by not giving her the space she asked for.

I should walk away. I should leave and let her sort this out without me following her around town, but I know deep down that I can’t. She became mine the second our eyes locked the first time. She’ll always be mine, and I will be damned if someone else tries to get to her.

Ingrid grabs a taxi to her office, and I am about to take one myself to follow her, but Saint picks that exact time to call and send me on a job. I want to rage at the thought of being away from Ingrid, but maybe this is the outlet I need to get rid of all this frustration burning inside of me.

My job is to deal with another small group of gang members who have been snooping around in our territory. Over the years, we’ve seen the formation and distraction of small groups that have come in and tried to assert dominance in our territory, but they’ve never lasted. The Steel Rebels have been running things for decades, and we’re never afraid to get our hands dirty so it stays that way.

Ice settles in my veins as I head back to where I’ve parked my bike, getting myself into the calm, stoic mood I channel when working. I find the men where Saint said they would be. There are three of them, brandishing metal rods as they threaten a bodega owner known to be under the club’s protection. They sneer as I park my bike, and it’s clear this is what they were hoping for when they came here.

“The Rebels are cockier than we thought sending just one of you,” the smaller of the three snarks. “Lucky for you, we’re not cheats like you all, so we’ll have a fair fight. Go on, call two more men.”

“One of me is plenty to exterminate some rats.”

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