Page 25 of Ruthless Claim

He looks at me for a long moment.

The scar on his cheek catches the light from the overhead fixture, and his auburn hair is catching it too.

He looks like someone a painter would have wanted to put on a canvas. I resent the observation even as I’m making it.

“What game are you playing now?” he asks, steepling his fingers together, his eyes locked on mine.

There it is. The fracture, small and clean, right down the center of everything I built this afternoon.

“It’s not a game,” I say coolly, fighting to maintain my evenness. “I was trying to be civil. My mother thinks we should find a way to coexist that doesn’t require both of us to be armed every waking moment, and I thought she had a point. Apparently, I was wrong, and I’d like to note for the record that it took you approximately six minutes to prove it.”

“Your mother,” he says, picking up his fork again and cutting into his food again, “has never spent five minutes in a room with me.”

“Lucky her, apparently.”

“So this was her idea.” He glances up at me and there’s something almost contemptuous in the curve of his mouth. “She told you to play nice, so you came home and decided to try it.”

“There are no candles,” I say, which is somehow the thing that comes out and it doesn’t make any sense but whatever. “And it wasn’t just her idea. It was also mine, because I am capable of independent thought unlike some people at this table⁠—”

A harsh laugh escapes him. “You want to talk about independent thought?" His blue eyes go a shade colder, and I know he’s decided to stop pulling his punches. “You’ve had exactly one original thought in the two weeks we’ve lived together, and it was reorganizing your shoes. Everything else—the gallery, the charity circuit, the carefully curated social life—that’s just the container your family built for you to stand in. You didn’t choose any of it. You just showed up and called it a personality.”

The words hit somewhere genuine and I feel my jaw tighten.

“That is⁠—”

“And the worst part,” he continues, voice still conversational, “is that you know it. You know that without the Santoro name you’re just a pretty woman with mediocre opinions about contemporary art. That’s why you fight so hard. Because if you stop, you have to live with that.”

The traffic sounds drift up from thirty floors below.

I look at him across the table—at that controlled, angular face, those cool blue eyes that are watching me with the steady patience of a man who has said the thing he wanted to say and is waiting to see what it does—and I go very, very still.

This is the thing people mistake for calm.

I go still when I’m at my most dangerous.

Cillian Brennan is about to find out.

“You want to talk about what we know?” I remark, and my voice has gone somewhere quiet and I fight to keep the tremor of anger from marring my tone. “Let’s talk about what I know.”

Cillian snorts. “This I have to hear.”

“I know that you are a man in his thirties who has never made a single decision for himself.” Cillian’s eyes flare for a moment before he schools his expression. Gotcha, asshole. “Not one. You work for Connor, you live for Connor, you married me for Connor, and every time you’ve had the chance to be something other than his weapon you have tucked yourself back in line like a good little soldier because the alternative is figuring out who you actually are without him.”

I hold his gaze. “The brutality I can respect, but the cowardice underneath it?” I wrinkle my nose. “That’s what I find pathetic.”

A dark look crosses his face. “Watch your mouth,” he says, quietly.

“Why?” I ask, wanting to go in for the kill now that I know what I’m saying is affecting him. “Is the truth uncomfortable, Cillian? You just spent five minutes telling me things specifically designed to wound me and you didn’t stop.”

I set my glass down. “You want to talk about identity, Cillian? Your entire identity is borrowed.” I shake my head in disgust. “You are Connor Brennan’s shadow wearing a man’s body, and you’ve been it so long you’ve forgotten the difference.”

His jaw tightens and a muscle works in it.

He leans forward very slightly, and the blue eyes are very direct now and fixed on me.

He looks irate and a smarter person would stop talking.

I don’t stop talking.