Page 99 of Pretty Dark Vows

“Peachy,” I tell him with a smile so fake that he busts up laughing.

“You’re really selling it,” he says, still grinning.

“I’m as good as I can be,” I say, opting for honesty this time. He knows me too well by now for him to believe a lie anyway. “I’m worried, and I’m antsy as hell to get this over with. But at the same time, I’m scared of what will happen when we actually do make a move to get Chloe back. Right now, it’s all just possibility and hope… but when it becomes real, what if shit goes bad?”

“Yeah, I get that. The waiting is the worst part. Too much time to imagine all the ways things could go wrong.” He purses his lips, then jerks his chin at me. “Come on.”

If he thinks we’re going to sneak off and fuck again… well, I wouldn’t say no. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, for a lot of reasons, but it would sure beat sitting up in my room and trying not to let my imagination run wild in the most horrible ways.

“What did I say about trusting me, princess?” he asks when I hesitate.

I shake my head. “Pissing Maddoc off right now could blow my only chance to get Chloe back.”

His green eyes warm, and he drops his head a little to meet my eyes. “It’ll be okay, I promise. Maddoc gets to decide a lot of shit around here, but not everything. I just want to show you something.”

I’m curious in spite of myself, so I follow him upstairs, past my room and past the library where Logan caught me snooping. He opens a door at the end of the hallway that I never got to investigate and leads me up another set of short stairs.

The third floor is a sort of attic space. It’s not too fancy, with unfinished walls and exposed beams. Paint spatters decorate the floor, and there are brushes and dozens of tubes of paint set out on a small table against one wall.

It’s an art studio.

I blink, then look up at Dante. “This is yours?”

He grins, and I realize I don’t need to ask. There are large canvases set up all around the well-lit space, and somehow the abstract paintings…feellike him. I’m not even sure how that makes sense, but it’s still true.

I wander toward one that might be the view out of my bedroom window if it were distorted through a lens that took out all recognizable shapes and just left color. The vibrant green is the same as the swath of foliage behind the house, and it reminds me of Dante’s eyes.

I run my finger over the thick, uneven paint. “I had no idea you were an artist.”

“Nobody is just one thing,” he says with a shrug. “Dad raised me to be a hitman, and the Reapers made good use of those skills when I joined up, but that doesn’t mean that’s all I am.”

My fingers go still, my heart picking up speed as he comes up behind me. He’s mentioned his father before, and it’s clear that he loved him a lot, but the information that his dad raised him to be a hitman is new.

And I’m not sure it’s something Dante meant to reveal about himself.

I want to ask more, but I hesitate to draw any attention to the fact that he said it, or to indulge my deepening curiosity to know more about him.

I don’t really know where Dante and I stand. It’s hard to deny there’s a connection between us, but it’s so fucking complicated that I’m scared to examine it too closely.

I clear my throat, the silence starting to feel awkward. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” I murmur.

He chuckles, resting his hand between my shoulder blades, but doesn’t say anything.

Knowing he was raised by a hitman and then followed in those footsteps drives home just how dangerous he is, and the fact that I’m both attracted to and repelled by that danger says things about me that I’m not sure I’m ready to face.

So I focus on the paintings instead. It’s easier. And they truly are beautiful.

“Tell me about them,” I say, moving to stand in front of a canvas saturated in red so bright that it could almost be mistaken for blood.

“My favorite color,” he says, following me. He takes my hand and rubs it over the ridges and valleys of the swirled paint, mimicking what I did with the green one. “I come up here to paint when I’ve got shit to work out in my head. Helps shut out the noise.”

He leads me to the next canvas, and this one isallnoise. Noise, but in color. As if he took it out of his head and left it on the canvas.

“I do that too, but with dance,” I say. “Have you always painted?”

“Nah. Not really much of a chance to when I was growing up. I didn’t even know it was a thing. Or like, obviously I knew it was a thing people did, but it didn’t exactly fit in my lifestyle, you know? But I’ve always liked the world better in color.”

He gives me a crooked smile, and it’s so beautiful andrealthat it makes my heart stutter.

---