Page 51 of Obsession
The lie comes too quickly, but I can’t fault him over. His face is pale beneath streaks of blood that don’t belong to him, eyes still too wide, mouth held carefully closed like if he loosens one part of himself, the rest might follow.
“Your throat,” I say.
“It’s fine.”
“It’smarked.”
His fingers tighten on his thighs. “So is the rest of me.”
The sentence sits between us, and for once I don’t know what to do with it. I could tell him those marks are mine. I could tell him that’s the difference, that what I leave on him is proof and what that bastard left is a violation. Even in my own head, the distinction sounds too honest to survive daylight. Instead of answering, I just gestured for us to head inside.
The front of the clubhouse goes quiet as we push through, my anger starting to rise again with how pliant Oisín is beneath my touch.
Tally steps into our path. “Saint.”
“Not now.”
“He’s bleeding.”
“He’s not.”
“That throat says otherwise.”
I stop long enough to look at her, and the room braces around the glance. Her gaze cuts from my face to Oisín’s, and the anger in her expression changes into something that understands exactly what I’m trying to get him away from.
“He’s coming upstairs,” I tell her.
“He needs to be looked at.”
“He needs out of this room.”
I wait for her to step aside and then take him through the private hall and into my room. The second the door closes behind us, the clubhouse falls away. Only my room, my bed, blood on my hands, and Oisín standing in the middle of it.
I strip first because if I stop moving, the warehouse will catch up. My cut comes off and lands over the chair. My shirt follows, peeled from skin where blood has started to tack the fabric down. I kick off my boots, undo my belt, moving on instinct.
Thinking means seeing Oisín pulled back against another man’s chest again. Thinking means feeling the useless weight ofthe gun in my hand when there was no shot to take. Thinking means admitting that for one second, before I dropped the weapon and moved, fear got its hand around my throat.
I turn around and find Oisín exactly where I left him. He hasn’t moved, standing near the foot of the bed, eyes wide, hands hanging loose at his sides. His hair is a mess, one curl stuck damply to his temple, and there’s a darkening bruise along the side of his throat where another man put pressure on what belongs to me.
The last of my control slips sideways. I cross the room and get my hands on him. He sucks in a breath when I grip the front of the cut and shove it off his shoulders. It hits the floor between us. His shirt is next, dragged up and over his head with no patience for the way his arms catch in the fabric. I need the blood off him. I need the warehouse off him. I need every trace of that man’s hands gone before the part of me that hasn’t stopped moving since the shot decides there are still people left to kill.
His skin is warm beneath my palms, smeared with rust-red streaks across his collarbone and ribs. I know it isn’t all his, but knowledge isn’t enough, so my hands move over him anyway, checking and claiming in the same rough pass.
“No one gets to fucking touch you except me,” I growl out.
His breath catches, and the sound drags through me like a hook.
I grip his jaw and turn his face, checking the mark at his throat under the light. “No one.”
A pained little sound leaves him, full of shock, hurt, and trust tangled so tightly I can’t separate them, and the fact that he’s making that sound for me, after what just happened, makes my temper look for another target because I can’t stand what it does inside my chest.
I catch his wrist and pull him toward the bathroom.
“Saint,” he says, not resisting, but not absent anymore either. His voice has come back thin and unsteady, and that should make me slow down. It doesn’t. I turn on the shower hard enough that water hammers against tile, steam rising almost immediately, heat filling the room until the mirror begins to fog at the edges.
I shove the rest of my clothes off, then go back to him with impatient hands. Every piece of fabric that holds blood, dust, or the memory of that warehouse has to come off. Oisín lets me strip him, but he’s returning to himself now, his fingers catching briefly at my forearm to steady himself.
I drag him under the spray with me, loosening blood from my skin in pinkish trails that curl down the drain. Oisín gasps when the heat finds the scrape at his throat, and I crowd him back against the tile before I can decide whether I’m checking him or cornering him. The answer is both. Every motive in me is jagged right now, too sharp to hold without cutting through the lie that this is just about business.
