Page 102 of Twisted Steel

I swallow glass.“Yes.”

She looks down at Reaper’s blood on the floor.At my knife.At my hands.Then back to my face.“I don’t know if I can make peace with what you are,” she says.

“I know.”

“But when he took me, I didn’t pray for the police.”Her laugh breaks.“I prayed you’d come.”My lungs stop working.“And you did.”

“I’ll always come for you.”

She steps closer.One step, then another.“I hate the blood,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“I hate the violence.”

“You should.”

“I hate that sometimes it saves me.”The words shake out of her.I stand still and let them.

She reaches for my hand, the bloodstained one, and my first instinct is to pull away, but she doesn’t let me.Her fingers curl around mine, careful of split knuckles and old scars.

“But I don’t hate you,” she says.

My control cracks enough that my head drops and my forehead touches hers.“Harper.”

“I’m not saying yes forever tonight,” she says.“I’m saying I’m not walking out clean if clean means walking out without you.”

My eyes close, and for one second, the slaughterhouse fades.The blood.The screams.The club.The war.Only her hand in mine remains.

I don’t move until she does.Harper rises onto her toes and kisses me.

The cut on her lip opens against my mouth, and the taste of copper nearly takes me back to the edge.I cup her face with both hands, careful of the bruise blooming along her cheekbone, careful of the split in her mouth, careful because everything in me wants to crush her against me just to prove she is alive.

She makes a broken sound, and I stop instantly.

“No,” she whispers against my mouth.“Stop acting like I’m glass.”

“You’re hurt.”

“I’m alive.”

“Harper.”

“I need to feel alive.”

Those words go through me like a blade.The whole building might be watching, and I don’t care.I care only that Harper’s hands are fisting in my shirt, that she is shaking but still choosing, that her mouth is on mine like she is trying to stitch herself back together with heat and breath and me.

I kiss her again.Deeper but still careful.

My hand slides to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her hair.Her body presses into mine, and I feel every tremor, every breath she drags in because she is alive and furious and mine.

She opens for me, and the kiss turns hungry.Too hungry for a slaughterhouse.Too much for a room with blood on the floor and my enemy screaming behind us.But grief and fear and want don’t wait for clean places.They take what they can get.

My other hand settles at her waist.She leans into it, and a sound leaves her throat that I will remember until I die, and my body answers so hard it hurts.

I pull back before I forget where we are.Before I do exactly what Reaper wanted and become nothing but instinct.

Harper’s eyes are dark and wet and furious.