Page 8 of Iron Bride

His jaw was so tense, I saw the muscle pulsing at his molars.

His heated gaze was… intoxicating.

It shouldn’t be. I was staring into the eyes of a murderer, but the electricity between us sent a jolt through me that I couldn’t ignore. And I very much wanted to ignore it.

“Fuck you,” I choked out against his hand.

“I am not accustomed to repeating myself.” His voice was deceptively calm. “Lie down, or I will tie you down.”

I wanted to fight him. I wanted to defy him. But dizziness overtook me.

He let me go, and I gasped in the air I didn’t know I needed. Not when his hand had beckoned my heart to beat.

Of course, he’d own me. Uncle Eoghan must have laid an Irish curse on me when he tied us together.

Cillian handed me a glass of water from the nightstand and opened a yellow prescription bottle, dumping two pills into his rough palm.

“Tell me, my little Gia.” Even the way he said my name was full of arrogant contempt. “What kind of cold causes a knife wound in the abdomen?”

Shit.Of course, he had seen it. He had probably been the one to change my clothes.

Why didn’t I feel violated? Why did being unconscious and naked before him not send a shiver of disgust through me? I hadn’t consented. I would never want him to see me so vulnerable.

And yet, I wasn’t upset at that.

I pulled up the shirt to look at my wound. Black, medical-grade stitches poked out of my skin. The swelling that I had tried to cover up with gauze and antiseptic had healed, a little.

He bounced the pills in his hand, a clear command for me to take them. I delicately pinched them from his hold, trying to minimize how much contact we had before examining them. The medical name for them was stamped along the sides, so if he was trying to kill me… he’d certainly have gone through a lot of effort to fake a painkiller and anti-inflammatory.

“Did you stitch yourself up?”

His hands were in his trouser pockets. He’d removed his tie; the top two buttons of his tuxedo shirt were unfastened. His hair was a mess, like he’d been tugging at it in frustration.

“Yes,” I admitted. Because the alternative was to lie, and then they might blame Marco for the poorly dressed wound. Who knew what they’d do to him.

“Why didn’t you come to me? To my family? To the fucking hospital?” he asked. “You had an infection, and the damn thing was a disgusting oozing mess before Maeve fixed you up.”

“Maeve isn’t a doctor,” I remarked.

At least she wasn’tyet.A med student.

“And yet, she did a better job on you than you did on yourself!” He yelled, then seemed to regain his control, and softened hisvoice. “If you hadn’t fainted, and we hadn’t fixed the wound, you would have died. Do you understand that?”

If Maeve knew I’d been stabbed, then my mother would too. The Green grapevine of gossip would have done its full rounds. I had hidden my wound from Mamma for four days, not wanting to break her heart any more than it was. Four careful days were now wrecked by the green serpents of New York.

I was going to throw up.

“Oh,” I said, stunned.

“Yeah.” He stepped away from the side of the bed, leaning back on the black-paned factory windows of his renovated penthouse. For good measure, he lifted a single brow, and sarcastically mocked, “Oh.”

He pulled the blade from his belt and started cleaning his nails. His initials, CKG—Cillian Kent Green—were etched on the handle.

My father’s last moments were with a blade that looked just like it, with slightly different letters.

Blood. So much fucking blood.The Greens were obsessed with spilling it, bathing in it, painting with it…

My grandfather’s blood. My father’s blood. My blood.

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