Page 141 of Wicked Proposal
“Don’t lie.” My voice drops, steel beneath it. “Do not fucking lie to me, Mia Winters. I know you. I can tell when you’re feeding me bullshit.”
I can tell when you’re too scared to speak.
Her eyes snap to mine. Heat floods her cheeks. “It wasn’t— He didn’ttouchme, Yulian. Not in the way you think. He was just here to scare me.” Her throat works, gaze wandering nervously around the room. “I swear, nothing happened.”
But he wanted it to.
I can see it in her face. In the way her body trembles, the way her breath hitches.
Fury coils in my chest. Hot, bright, seething fury.
If Brad was here now, every doctor in the hospital combined wouldn’t be able to save him.
I shift closer, until there’s barely a breath between us. “I should have killed him at StarTech,” I growl. “I shouldn’t have let him walk out of there. Not on his own two legs.”
She swallows hard. “You can’t fix everything by killing.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Her lips part, but she doesn’t argue. Instead, she drops her gaze to the floor again. “He threatened him,” she confesses, her voice a whisper. “He threatened Eli.”
My blood goes cold. “He knows?”
“I don’t think so. Not yet. But he said…” Her hands start shaking around her paper cup. “He said he’ll find out about my secrets. All of them.” Panic fills her voice. Her breaths grow short again, quick, too quick. “I have to take him away, Yulian. I can’t stay here with this threat hanging over our heads. I have to run, I have to?—”
“You have to calm down.” Once again, I touch my forehead to hers. Like I did back in the car, a whole month ago.
That night, I was the one who ran.Me.The fearsomepakhan,the shadow king of New York, the untouchable CEO, sent running by a wisp of a woman in a crumbling Brownsville apartment. By the words she whispered to me in the dark.
“Go. Before we do something we’ll both regret.”
“Like what?”
“Fall.”
How fucking cowardly.
“Breathe,” I command, tone steady. My hand finds the back of her head, holds her gently through it. “In, hold, out.”
With a breathless nod, Mia obeys. Always obeys, no matter what I ask her. No matter how bright the fire in her burns, that riotous part of her soul that never wants to yield.
I thought I’d tamed her, in that room at the Goldenrod, but I didn’t have a clue, did I?
Mia Winters doesn’t break.
Not for anyone.
Not even for me.
And that’s what scares me most of all. That I might not want her broken. That I might want her whole, exactly as she is, fierce and indomitable and the worst pain in the ass I’ve ever fucking met.
That I might want her at all. Not just to use, but tokeep.
To have and to hold.
“Thank you,” she whispers, steadier now. Her perfume lingers around her, violets and candy and something else I can’t place. Something uniquely hers. “I’m okay now.”
“Good.”
