Page 82 of Greed
She arched an eyebrow. “Is that some kind of line?”
“Line?”
“Pick-up line.”
“No! I swear I’m not… Lilo.” His fists opened and closed at his sides. “I swear, I just need to show you something. It will help explain.”
But, didn’t he want more?
Yes. He wanted everything she had to give, and that made him the greediest man of them all, because he wasn’t sorry.
The internal battle must have reflected in his eyes, because her own softened. “Okay. Take me there.”
And with her words, he felt like the wolf who ate Red Riding Hood.
A few minutes later, they walked down the hallway leading to his apartment. Try as he might, he couldn’t dispel the anxiety creeping up his spine. Would she call him a freak, a weirdo? Would she take one look at the mess which so reflected the state of his mind, and would she run… or—
“Griffin,” she murmured. “Are you okay?”
Eyes wide, he caught her gaze. “No.”
“It’s okay. Whatever it is in there, I can deal with it… unless it’s a dead body. Yeah, look. I’m not up for that, I’ll tell you right now. You know what? I don’t even think I’d like to see a place that used to hold dead bodies. You know, the kind that serial killers do their work in. You’re not a secret serial killer, are you? Oh my god, you wouldn’t even tell me if you were!” She bit her lip to stop the flow of words.
“It’s not a dead body. I’m not a serial killer.”
“Okay.” She relaxed. “Okay, I think I’m good then.”
He grimaced, hesitating.
“Griff,” she said. “You know the worst about me, don’t you?”
She must mean her family history. “Yes.”
“And?” she urged.
“And what?”
“Do you hate me for it?”
“No.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Not even close. You’re perfect. I trust you completely, it just took me a while to get out of my own head long enough to realize that. The only person who deserves hate is me, for leaving you in that stairwell.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty shitty thing to do, and I’m looking forward to the explanation.”
“I need to start at the beginning.”
He held out his wrist tattoo and told her everything. How his birth mother was able to isolate the genome sequence for greed and program his body to sense deadly levels in other people. How the sensing of the sin affected him mentally. How he’d tried to curb his greedy desires with his balance protocol, and how he was the only one of his siblings to keep the sin in check, and then finally, how she came into all of it. Her calming effect on his psyche, the confusion she brought, the power she triggered in him… When he was done, she stood there with eyes so wide and glazed, he thought maybe he’d broken her.
“Lilo?” he asked, afraid, because for once, he was the one rambling with no control over his words.
“I’m just… that’s a lot to take in.”
“There’s more.”
She blinked. “More?”
Here goes nothing.
“We trained for seven years around the world in the art of war,” he said, unlocking his apartment door. “It began when I was fifteen. It was brutal, humiliating, and exhausting. It pushed me to the limits of human capacity, and then some. They wanted to see me break, and… I almost made it the full seven years without breaking. I almost showed them, but I failed. I failed enough that I was lucky to get out of there alive.” He wanted to elaborate, to explain why he failed… his most shameful secret, but…not yet. “After I got home from the training, I created a protocol to keep my balance in check so my failure wouldn’t happen again. It worked perfectly, at least, I thought it did. So when I met you, I was rude because you threw my logical process into chaos. I was afraid of failing again. It took me hurting you in that stairwell to realize I was already failing, I was already broken.”
