Page 122 of Twisted Temptation

“And that frightens me the most. Who the fuck have I married, mistakenly trusted⁠—”

I take a step forward. “You can trust me.”

"You should have talked to me!" Her voice breaks open, and what comes out is raw and furious and shaking. "It was my story, Dante. Mine. Not yours to investigate. Not yours to act on. Not yours to avenge without even talking to me. You didn't give me a choice. You just got on a plane and you —"

Her whole body trembles.

“Sunny—"

"I wasn't ready," she says. "I wasn't ready to tell you. I was going to. I was working up to it. But it was mine, Dante. It was the one thing I had control over … when I told you, how I told you, how much I told you. And you took that from me. Fuck, why do men think they can just take from me like it’s a God-given right?"

Her words hit me so hard I actually step back. She is comparing me to him.

"I’m nothing like him," I say quietly.

"Maybe not. But right now that's how I feel."

Rain pounds against the windows, and in the background, the news anchor drones on about Parker-Downey's disappearance, and I feel absolutely gutted that Sunny would feel that way.

She stares at me. And I watch it happen. The thing I've been dreading since the day I married her. The moment she stops seeing the man and starts seeing the monster.

"How many people have you killed?"

"Sunny, I didn’t⁠—"

"How many?" she demands.

"That's not a question you want answered."

"You're right. I don't." She presses her hand against her mouth and holds it there for a second. "The gun at my father's head. That wasn't a performance. You would have actually killed him."

"Yes."

She flinches, and I feel it in the deep trenches of my black heart.

“And what about me? Would you have killed me, too, if you didn’t need a wife?”

“No, I’ve never killed a woman or an innocent person.”

“Oh, so you’re a nice killer. Good to know.” She turns her back on me. "I always thought you existed in this gray area, but this isn't gray. This is pitch black."

"What I’ve done, I’ve done for you."

She swings back to look at me, then steps forward and shoves me.

"You did it for you," she cries. "Because you found out what he did, and your ego couldn't handle it. Because someone touched something you think belongs to you, and you couldn't let that stand. That's not protection, Dante. That's possession."

"That is not what this is."

"Then why didn't you talk to me first? Why didn't you come home and say, ‘Sunny, I know what happened. What do you want me to do?’ Why didn't you give me a voice in the one thing that mattered more than anything?"

I don't have an answer because she's right. I sat in that office with Pete's words screaming in my head and the red haze descending, and I didn't think about what she wanted. I thought about what I needed. Which was to make the man who hurt her stop existing. I needed the world to be a place where Jeremy Parker-Downey didn't breathe the same air as my wife. I needed it with a desperation that bypassed everything else. Including her needs.

I acted on fury, but I told myself it was love.

But I need her to understand that this fury was born from love. That in some fucked up way, love was able to grow from something dark, and I’ve fallen batshit crazy in love with her.

And I want her to feel safe. I want her to take her power back from him.