Page 26 of Kept By the Bratva
“I get it,” I say.
“No.” His voice. Rough in a new way, rough in the way that costs him, rough in the way I’ve only heard twice in my life andboth times it wrecked me. “You don’t. Everyday.Everyweek.Six weeks of that. Torture, Laura.“
I hold his gaze for a long moment. Then he breaks into a thoughtful look that is belied by a half-grin. “Hmm. I could use that as a tool.” His mouth pulls. Dark and certain. “More effective than bullets.” His mouth tilts further. “Less blood too.”
“I take it back, there might actually be something wrong with you.”
“Definitely, but it’s too late to back out now.” He steps forward. His hands find my face. His thumbs on my cheekbones, holding me exactly the way he held me in a hotel suite the first time, and my body goes from furious to undone in the space of that touch. “We’re past all of it. You’re with me.” His eyes hold mine. “Forever.”
The word settles into my chest and stays there.
“Yes,” I say.
“And ever.” His forehead drops to mine. “This life and the next.”
“And the next,” I agree. My hands close on his shirt. “You’re going to be terrible at this.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to have to fight you every single day.”
“Probably.”
“And you’re going to try to manage everything and control everything and send me places in the middle of the night when things get hard—”
“Less than before.”
“That’s not a promise.”
“No.” His mouth brushes the edge of mine. “But it’s a start.”
We don’t make it to the bedroom.
We make it to the wall, which is closer, and that’s where it stays for a while — his hands and my hands and the impossible relief of him against me after six weeks of the sheets and thedrinking and the missed seconds and minutes and hours that accumulated into something unbearable. He kisses me like he has a point to make and intends to make it thoroughly. I let him. I make the same point back.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he says, against my throat, “for six weeks.”
“Just six?”
His exhale is rough. “Don’t push it.”
He lifts me and my legs go around him and the wall is behind me and he is completely, mercifully, devastatingly present, and I stop making words for a while.
Later — the bedroom, the dark, the mountain of things we still have to figure out arranged quietly around us — he puts his hand flat to my stomach. Low. Careful. The gentleness I have watched surprise him every time it comes out of him.
“Hi,” he says. Quiet. Not to me.
“He can’t hear you yet,” I say, over the lump in my throat. A lump I can't seem to swallow down.
“She.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I know.” He’s looking at his hand on my stomach. There’s something open in his face I’ve never seen — undefended, nothing held back, nothing between him and the thing he’s feeling. “I know what I’m capable of,” he says quietly. “I’ve known since I was eleven years old. But I also know—” He stops. His jaw works. “I know what it cost not to have it. Love. Someone who stays.” His eyes come up to mine. “I’m not my father. And I’m not my mother. And whatever I am—monster, killer, difficult man, all of it—” His hand presses gently. “I am going to be here.”
The words don’t shake. He means them with everything.
“I know,” I say.
I put my hand over his.
Outside, the city does what cities do — indifferent, ongoing, completely unconcerned with what has just been decided in a third-floor apartment on Tremont Street. The window is dark. I’m not checking it. I have everything I was waiting for.
Right here.
Under my hand.
