Page 3 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"Your eyes give you up, lesser devil."
"Do not lie to us, Daniil." Jade's voice softer than Lily's, which made it worse. "Whatever this becomes, we are with you."
"Then leave. She does not need an audience."
They went. Lily made it three steps down the hall before she turned back, hand on the doorframe, the smile she wore when she was about to draw blood.
"She is pretty, your bad-room girl. Try not to look at her like that when she wakes."
The door clicked shut behind them.
The room held one lamp on low, the bed turned down, her shoes already off and set neat on the rug. Somebody, Jadeprobably, had laid a blanket over her up to the collarbone. Her hair was spread on the pillow in a dark fan, one strand caught against the corner of her mouth, lifting with her breath.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under me and she did not stir.
I lifted the strand of hair off her mouth with two fingers and laid it back along her temple. I did it slowly, the way a man defuses a thing he does not want to break. The pulse at her throat moved steady and small under the skin. My thumb found the curve of her cheekbone before I had given it permission, and my palm settled along her jaw, and her face turned, in sleep, into my hand.
I had spent my life being the warm one. The joker. The lesser devil. The brother who laughed first so the rest of them could breathe.
I was not laughing now.
She is mine, I thought, and she does not know it yet, and I left my hand against her face, and I did not move it for a long time.
2
CHLOE
The ceiling above me was not mine.
I knew it before I opened my eyes. The plaster sat too high. The air had a weight I did not own, something warm and dry, faintly cedar, with the cleanness of a sheet someone else had folded with care. My pillow smelled like a soap I had never bought. The blanket pressing down on my legs was twice the weight of my own.
I kept my eyes closed for one more breath. I counted in Korean under my breath.Hana, dul, set.My hand found the hem of the dress I had put on the night before, still on me, the strap a little crooked at the shoulder. My shoes were off. I was not sore in any place a body should not be sore.
The night came back in pieces.
The club. Bo on the curb with both hands on my elbows asking three times if I would be fine, and me promising her I was. The bar. A song with too much bass for the room. A man in a navy jacket with a smile that did not move correctly.
The second glass.
My pulse climbed the inside of my throat and pulled cold up after it. I had been polite about the glass. I had been polite aboutthe hand at the small of my back. I had been polite right up to the point where the floor began to soften under my heels and the bartender stopped meeting my eyes.
Where am I?
I made myself open my eyes the rest of the way.
The room was warm wood and pale linen. A lamp on a low chest. A curtain pulled almost shut, a band of late morning slipping in at the edge, falling in a soft yellow stripe across the rug. Water on the table beside me, a glass with a saucer set on top to keep the dust off. A small plate with a folded napkin. My bag was on the dresser, zipped, set straight, as if someone had carried it for me without looking inside.
And on the long couch under the window, a man was asleep.
My breath caught at the back of my throat and stayed there.
He was too tall for the couch. His shoes were off, lined up under the frame, toes pointed toward the door. One arm hooked behind his head, the other lay open across his stomach, fingers half curled the way a hand lies when it has finally stopped holding anything. His jacket was folded as a pillow, lining out, the kind of fold a person makes when he is not staying.
I should have been more afraid.
I waited for the cold thing in my chest to climb higher. It did not. It set its weight down between my ribs and stayed where it was, not gone, but not what it had been a minute before.
I looked at his face because I could not stop looking. Dark hair, longer in front, fallen back from his brow. Sharp cheekbones, the kind that put a shadow under themselves in any light. A mouth that, even asleep, looked like it was holding the back end of a joke. Stubble at his jaw, a small white scar at the temple, lashes too long for a man who knew the kind of work those knuckles knew.
