Page 20 of Pray for Scars
“You’ll be happy to know it wasn’t what it looked like,” he says smoothly. We walk over his dark wooden floors, head down the hallway and into the living room with carpet so dark it’s nearly black. So thick I swear I sink into it as I head to his black leather couch and sit on the arm of the chair, my arms crossed, legs stretched out in front of me, feet on the floor.
He passes me, heads to the kitchen adjacent to the open plan living room, steps inside his liquor pantry, comes out with a bottle of spiced rum.
I don’t say anything except, “When are they coming?”
He pours himself a drink, adds ice from the freezer, then makes another one, adding way too much rum and only a drop of Coke.
He screws the cap back on the bottle, puts it back in the fridge.
“Be here in a few,” he answers. He comes into the living room, a drink in each hand, ice clinking against the glass. “Your dad gone?”
He hands the strongest drink to me. I take it, glaring at him as he takes a seat in the chair across from me and settles in, eyes red and glassy.
“Will be.” Somewhere between asking me how the sex worker’s lips felt around my dick and threatening the girl I love to hate, he confirmed his flight plans for tonight, courtesy of the private jet I’ve never been on.
I’m not trusted with that yet. Not until this year’s Sacrificium. On my birthday. So long as I don’t fuck it up like I did last year, letting Sid get away.
Maverick takes a drink, and so do I. If I’m going to have to deal with him, and her being so fucking close to me and yet so goddamn far away, then I need to get drunk as fuck to do it.
Two weeks she’s escaped my grasp. Two weeks, after a short, bloody reunion from a year apart.
I shake the thought from my mind. I can’t go down that road again. The one with some kind of fucked up hope at the end of it.
There’s no hope here. But my eyes find Mav’s vaulted ceiling anyway—knowing she must be exhausted if she’s this quiet up there—and I hear him laugh.
“Is she pregnant?” he asks me quietly. I shift my gaze to him. He takes a drink.
“Too soon to tell.”
I finish my own drink, lean forward and slam it on the coffee table, relishing in the burn of it down my throat, into my chest.
“This might not work.” His finishes his drink, too. “Tonight, I mean.”
I clench my jaw, cross my arms. I lock eyes on him, and he watches me with a slight frown. “She has to remember something.”
“If she doesn’t?” His eyes flick up to the ceiling.
I don’t answer him.
Mav laughs but when he looks at me, after placing his own empty glass on the table, there’s no humor in his cold eyes. “I don’t trust you with her. I don’t trust her with you. If she’s what your father thinks she is, Luce, you need to let this shit go.”
Lethergo,is what he doesn’t say.
“You shared one fucked-up night. She’s brutal, man. I’ve never met a girl like her. She…” He runs a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “She’s got a little of the devil in her.”
Before I can respond, there’s a chime at the door, and I hear Atlas say, “Fuck Mav, you need to start getting high outside, man.”
I hear Ezra’s deep laugh, and I don’t hear Cain but I see him first when he steps into the living room, wearing a grey blazer, white shirt underneath. He cocks his head, those dark eyes that look nearly black this far away shifting from me to Mav and back again.
“Trouble in paradise?” he asks without a smile. He heads to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
Ezra sinks down at the far end of the couch I’m sitting on, hooks his arms around the back as he looks to me.
“You got her?” He’s wearing a black, long sleeve shirt, dark jeans.
“Upstairs chained to my bed,” Maverick replies with a smirk.
Ezra doesn’t look away from me. “That piss you off?” he asks me, his dark, hazel eyes narrowed.
