Page 139 of Shadow Of Sin
“I missed you,” I say into her hair. “Every second of every day. That’s a fact.”
She pulls back and looks at me, her face a mess of tears and mascara and that stubborn jaw that make her more beautiful than she’s ever been.
“I missed you too,” she says. “And I’m furious that I missed you. And I’m still so angry I could scream.”
“Eva.”
“What?”
My throat tightens. Then my chest. Then everything else because my body knows what I’m about to do, and it’s trying to stop me the way it’s been stopping me for weeks. The wall goes up. My nervous system screams that the last time I let these words out of my mouth, they were handed to a woman who was paid to catch them.
But Eva is standing in front of me with her hand on my jaw and tears on her face. She drove three hours to hear the truth from a man who has done nothing but fail her. She stood in front of a gun for her brother. She held me together on a restaurant floor while I bled.
She is not a test. She never was.
“I love you.”
My throat almost closes around the words. They come out rough and cracked and my voice breaks halfway through, and I don’t care because they’re out and it’s about damn time she heard them.
“I love you. It scares the hell out of me but I’m saying it anyway because you deserve to hear it, and I’m done letting my father’s experiment decide what I get to feel.”
She stares up at me. Her lower lip trembles and she bites down on it hard.
“Say it again,” she whispers.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you, Eva.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been locked inside her for two weeks. Maybe longer. Maybe since prison. Maybe since the first time a man said those words to her and then proved they meant nothing.
“I love you too.” Her voice is thick, garbled with tears. “I love you and I hate that I love you and I’m still so mad at you that I can barely see straight. And if you ever hide something from me again, I will put a knife through a part of you that isn’t already damaged.”
“Challenge accepted.”
“I’m not joking, Wolfe.”
“I know you’re not. You always have a knife on you. I’m not stupid enough to make you use it.”
She makes a sound that’s half laugh and half sob and pushes her face back into my neck and holds on.
I hold her back, my eyes latching onto the two chairs on the porch out the kitchen window.
Our chairs.
And for the first time in two weeks, my cabin isn’t empty.
CHAPTER 35
WOLFE
I stare down at my phone screen, my gut knotting tighter with each word I read.
House. Eight o’clock. Tonight.
That’s it. No context. When Ronan sends a text that short, it means something happened that he doesn’t trust to say over a phone screen.
