Page 63 of Freed
“It’s the only one you’re getting this early.”
My temper sparks. “You know, for someone who hates beingtold he doesn’t think things through, you do keep proving my point.”
That wipes the amusement from his face. Good.
I push off the counter and step closer, juice still in hand. “What exactly is the long game, Lorenzo? Lock me in a London townhouse until Stockholm syndrome does the rest? Parade me around in clothes that scream money and control until I forget you tore me off an altar?”
His gaze hardens. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“I think you took me without having the slightest clue what comes after.” My voice drops colder. “And now you’re improvising.”
He sets his coffee down with deliberate care. “You’re still here.”
I bark out a humorless laugh. “What a compelling strategy.”
His jaw tightens. I should stop there. I don’t.
“Do you know what’s really bothering you?” I ask softly. “It isn’t that I was going to marry Dante. It’s that he made me look happy.”
Something dangerous moves through his face. There. That struck true.
I take another step, reckless now, because I’m tired and angry and still aching in ways I don’t want to examine too closely. “You could handle me frightened. You could handle me angry. But happy?” I tilt my head. “That must have felt unbearable.”
His eyes lock onto mine with a force that should make me step back.
Instead, I hold his gaze.
“It killed you,” I whisper.
The room goes very still. For one stretched-out second, all I can hear is the faint ticking of some unseen clock and the blood rushing in my ears.
Then Lorenzo says, very quietly, “Do you want to know what killed me?”
I shouldn’t answer. But I do.
“What?”
He moves then. Not fast enough to startle. Slow enough to make it worse. He closes the distance between us until I can smell coffee and clean soap and the darker, more dangerous scent that is simply him. He reaches past me to set my glass on the counter, his fingers brushing mine just enough to send a small, treacherous current through my hand.
Then he leans in.
“What killed me,” he says, voice low and velvet-dark, “was the way you looked at peace like you didn’t believe it would stay. Like part of you was already bracing for it to be taken.”
My breath catches.
He lifts one hand, hooks a finger lightly into the hem of the hoodie at my hip, then lets it fall without tugging. The gesture is nothing. The gesture is everything.
“And I knew,” he continues, “that even if you smiled for him, some part of you was still waiting for the world to turn cruel again.”
My pulse stutters.
“If I looked that way, then it’s because of what you did to me,” I whisper.
His eyes darken.
“Maybe,” he says.
We stand there in the morning light with too much history and too little distance between us, and I become excruciatingly aware of the fact that I am not wearing enough beneath this hoodie to survive him looking at me like this.
