Page 27 of Ruthless Claim

4

CILLIAN

I should have left the dining room.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to, in the aftermath.

The clear and obvious decision was to stand up from that table, tell her we were done for the night, and walk away.

I’ve walked away from worse. I’ve walked away from men twice her size who were considerably more threatening than a furious twenty-six-year-old in a silk dress, and I did it without breaking a sweat.

Instead I stayed. Then I mentioned her mother. Then I twisted the knife by calling her a well-trained girl.

Then she threw her wine glass at my head, which, for the record, I saw coming and I probably deserved it. What I didn’t see coming was everything that happened after.

The wine glass hits the wall and shatters and the sound of it is still ringing in the air when Valentina looks at me from across the table.

Her chest is heaving.

Her dark hair has come partially loose from wherever she’d pinned it, falling across her shoulder in a wave, and her face—god, her face. I’ve seen the cold anger she uses in public, but that’s not what this is.

This is something rawer.

The careful facade completely gone, nothing left but the fire underneath it, and she is⁠—

She is magnificent.

That’s the only word my brain unhelpfully produces.

“You fucking bastard,” she says, and her voice is shaking with anger. “You smug, cold, miserable⁠—”

“You missed,” I remark, nodding at the broken glass on the floor.

Wrong thing to say.

She grabs a decorative bowl from the sideboard, and she hurls it at the wall behind me with the full force of her body behind it. It detonates against the plaster with a sound like a gunshot and I don’t flinch.

I’ve been in rooms with actual gunshots and the reflex has been trained out of me, but I do reassess her little temper tantrum.

“Feel better?” I ask dryly.

“No,” she snaps as she rounds the table before thrusting her finger at me, aiming it at my chest.

She’s close enough that I can see how dark her eyes have become.

They’re almost black, the brown gone so dark it’s disappeared.

She is close enough that I can smell that damned intoxicating perfume of hers. “You—you don’t get to talk about my mother,” she snarls, her cheeks pink with her anger. “You don’t get to sit there in my dining room eating my food and drinking wine I poured for you and tell me I don’t have a self. You don’t know me⁠—”

“I know enough—” I interrupt, folding my arms over my chest.

“You know nothing,” she barks, and her voice breaks slightly on the nothing. “You know what you decided I was at Leo’s wedding before I said ten words to you. You decided I was soft and decorative and easily dismissed and you’ve been treating me like a mild inconvenience ever since, and the fact that it isn’t working is driving you absolutely insane⁠—”

“Driving me insane?” I repeat in disbelief. Is that what she seriously thinks? “You want to talk about insane? You want to talk about what it’s been like living with someone who schedules her entire day around avoiding me⁠—”

Valentina’s eyes flare. “Because you’re impossible to be around⁠—”

“Because you’re scared,” I shoot back, and I lean forward slightly. Every instinct is telling me to stop and I should stop, but I don’t. “If you actually had to be in the same room as me for five consecutive minutes without a fight to hide behind, you’d have to deal with the fact that I’m not what you decided I was either, and that is genuinely scary for someone who needs to be right more than they need to breathe⁠—”