Page 79 of Ruthless Claim

I don’t know. I go back through the years with all the jobs and injuries, and I can’t find a single memory of someone sitting down beside me and deciding, without being asked, that my well-being was worth this much of their attention.

Connor never.

Teresa tried once, when I was fifteen, but I was too angry and too stupid to let her.

After that I handled things myself.

You learn to.

You learn to be self-sufficient in a way that starts to feel like strength and takes a long time to recognize as the absence of something.

She picks up my right hand and opens the antiseptic. I brace. This is going to hurt like a bitch.

The sting hits sharp and immediate, but I don’t move.

I’ve been hurt by people who meant it and Valentina Santoro with antiseptic cotton is not the thing that breaks me. But she sees me brace and her hand gently covers my arm. It feels like fire.

“Sorry,” she says quietly. “This one’s bad.”

I shift uncomfortably in the stool, not used to being fussed over. “It’s fine.”

“Cillian.” She says my name gently, which is once again very uncomfortable. “It’s not fine. Stop saying it’s fine.”

I close my mouth.

She works in silence for a moment and I watch the top of her head, the dark hair shining in the lights of the kitchen.

I would burn the entire city down before I let someone like Mickey Sheehan say her name again.

She wraps the right hand and moves to the left.

Her robe shifts when she reaches across the counter for the gauze and I hear a small sound, like the rustling of paper on fabric, and she pauses.

Quirking a brow, Valentina dips her hand into her pocket and brings out a post-it note.

My Post-it note.

The one I put in her coat pocket a few days ago. Cailín deacair.

Difficult girl.

With the crown.

She looks at it for a second.

Then she looks at me, her eyes wide. She wasn’t expecting for me to see that she still has it.

“It was in my pocket,” she responds quickly, stuffing it back in there. “I forgot it was there.”

I narrow my eyes, fighting back a smirk. “I put that in your coat pocket, Valentina. Not your robe pocket.”

A pause and she swallows heavily. “I like the crown,” she says with great composure, before going back to the bandage like none of that happened.

I can see the outline of the note in the thin material of her robe, but I drag my gaze to look at her profile—the set of her jaw, the very deliberate focus she’s applying to the gauze—and something warm and bright settle in my chest.

“The note from this morning,” I say. “The one in my shoe.”

Her hands still, then they keep moving. “What about it?”