Page 48 of Sinful Desires
“Because I’m not planning on using it on myself, soldier.”
My brows furrowed. “What did you want?” If she wasn’t here for drugs, then what the hell could she possibly?—
The second I caught the look in her eyes, it hit me. Slow. Heavy. Heated.
Putain de merde.
Her lips curled. “Yeah,” she drawled, savoring every letter. “I think I’ll take my chances somewhere else. I’d hate to lower myself enough to useyouas a toy.” She stepped in closer, her breath brushing my lips. “Even I have standards.”
She let those words hang, sweet and cruel, before turning away, knowing damn well I was still watching.
A slow, ugly heat spread in my chest. Anger, thick with something worse—dread.
She was slipping.
Her mind was already chasing the numbness, desperate to drown the crash before it hit. Before she was forced to sit in the ruins and face what she had tried to do. Before she saw how rotten everything around her really was. How rotten she had become inside.
I had seen it before. I had lived it. I knew every fucking step of that descent.
But what she needed was not some filthy drug from a back alley. It was not the quick, useless relief of some unknown bastard between her legs. That would not happen under my watch. Not now. Not fucking ever.
She didn’t need numbness. She needed control.
And I would be the one to teach her.
Chapter
Fifteen
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
? Ernest Hemingway
Scarlett
The wind bit at my cheeks as I stepped out of the car. I pulled my cardigan tighter, sneakers crunching over cracked concrete.
“When you said you had something to show me, I pictured food. Flowers. Maybe a stolen Monet. Not a hidden murder cave in the middle of nowhere.”
LeRoy slammed the door behind him, not bothering with a response. Just sent me one of those half-lidded, soul-dismissing looks he’d mastered. The kind that implied I was a waste of oxygen, but unfortunately, he still had to deal with me.
He punched in a code on the black steel door and opened it, then waited.
“You first,” I said. “In case this is a trap.”
“If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t drag it out,” he muttered. “Would’ve saved myself years of migraines.”
I followed him in, rolling my eyes so hard I nearly sprained something. I opened my mouth to remind him it’d beenmonths, notyears, but decided against it.
Darkness swallowed us. I walked forward blindly until my forehead hit something solid. His back felt like concrete wrapped in black cotton.
“God, do you train your back with steel or spite?” I groaned, massaging my forehead just as the lights flickered on overhead.
His silence pressed against my skin, heavier than the room, heavier than the cold pool water, and I hated that it still made me feel something.
I should have stayed in my room, kept the door shut, kept his poison out of my ears. I was one breath away from admitting it, from saying I needed sex to drain the urge to kill myself. I didn’t let it out, but it didn’t fucking matter. I was still there, still restless, still hollow, still hoping he would do more than stare.
I looked up and froze. The underground room was massive. The kind of quiet that made your skin itch.
