B
I have no one to blame but myself for not being able to sleep. I could’ve taken the high road. Or ignored everything Killian said in Axel’s office.
Instead, I had to goad him. Now I lie in bed, the ache between my thighs an ever-expanding balloon of agonizing need that shrieks for attention. I toss onto my side, the other reason for my insomnia staring me in the face.
I left my box back at the club. I couldn’t very well retrieve it with Killian dogging my every footstep, hovering closer than my shadow. And since I don’t know if or when I’ll be returning, the anxiety that’s been eating away at me is escalating.
I toyed with calling Axel when I came to my room earlier, but after witnessing the nauseating male bonding between him and Killian, I can’t trust that he won’t let something slip if they ever meet again.
An instant later, a twinge of discomfort snags at me for distrusting him. He trusted me enough to let me take care of him when he visited his punishment room. I trusted him enough to let him look in on me when I visited mine, although I haven’t done that for a long time now. I’ve allowed other people’s need for absolution to suppress my own, despite my every intention of keeping the box close so that I’d have a constant reminder. Since I spend…spent more time at the club than at my own apartment, I thought it better to just leave it there.
Now, the possibility that I might not have it close for a while burns me with acid guilt. It’s what propels me out of bed at four in the morning when I finally give up hope of sleeping. I need to get it back.
I grab my phone and send Axel a quick text.
He’s already awake or my message has woken him. Either probability doesn’t please him.
Axel: Can you tell the time, B?
My anxiety is too high for me to indulge in our usual derisive banter.
Me: My box from my room on the sixth floor. I need it delivered. Discreetly.
The bubbling cloud shows he’s replying to my message.
Axel: Sure. Name time and place for delivery.
Relief punches through me.
Me: Thank you. I’ll let you know. I owe you.
Axel: Lunch with Cleo when you’re done sorting your shit out. For some insane reason, she likes you.
Me: Deal.
With that taken care of, I smile a little to myself as I put away my phone. Axel is much farther gone about Cleo than he lets on. What I know of his baggage suggests it’s as heavy as mine. But he’s dealing with it. Whereas I vacuum-packed my guilt, swapped sensible Mary Janes for fuck-me Louboutins, and very rarely looked back until the past slammed into me three weeks ago.
Shit, something else I need to tell Killian.
I turn over, and the sheets tangle between my legs. With one problem taken care of, Killian is front and center of my mind. And in front and center of that is the memory of the erection tenting his pants when I left his study. The thing was fucking huge. Gloriously ready and available. I felt actual pain when I shut the door behind me. The slickness between my legs now tells me I’ll be feeling it for a long time.
Unless I give in. Take what he claims is mine. The temptation is unrelenting. But what I fear more than fucking Killian again is becoming addicted to the us that should never have been in the first place.
I lost everything even before we hooked up the first time.
I lost what little was left when I went off script and severely jeopardized our mission. Killian doesn’t know it, but I have nothing left to give.
We thought we covered our tracks well when I packed my bags the day after Matt’s funeral and claimed I needed time and distance. But my friends and family knew. Disapproval turned into harsh judgment. Then into rejection. I didn’t give a shit. High on my giddy little adventure, I flipped everyone that mattered the bird on my way to my new, exciting life. And even broken and battered as I am now, I don’t think I want to go back. That part of my life is behind me. Besides, I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’m irreparably altered, and I can’t bear to see the evidence of that change in others’ eyes.
The last time I saw my mother, she stared at me with sad, condemning eyes. “It’s a mercy your sister isn’t here. She always looked up to you. God knows what she would think of you and what you’re doing now.”
I didn’t tell my mother Julia was partly the reason I embraced my new life. But I hated my mother a lot for saying that. Because I would give anything for Julia to be alive, just so she would learn from my example and not make the same mistakes.
Thoughts of my sister propel me from bed and out of the bedroom. I’m still wearing my tank top and panties, and I don’t stop to throw on any more clothes. It’s a reckless little move with guilt and temptation flowing in my blood like the headiest drug. But fuck it. My damned soul could do with being a little more damned. Maybe then I’ll embrace my doom and get some actual sleep.
I hear the rapid clacking of a keyboard, and I don’t hesitate to push the study door open. The light from the monitor reflects his stupidly gorgeous face. Although it’s clear he hasn’t been to bed yet, or his night has been as shitty as mine.
He looks as wrung dry as I feel. Against my will, my earlier irritation over his possessiveness dissolves. Yes, I want to fuck the living shit out of him, but I also want to cradle him in my arms, caress his forehead with soothing fingers, and watch him sleep the way I used to. But then his eyes meet mine. And tension whistles through me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he responds. Sizzling blue eyes take in my semi-naked body before returning my gaze. The memory of his hoarse plea from earlier rams into me. But I can tell the mood is gone for him. Or at least temporarily cloaked by something else. I find out a second later.
“While you were sleeping Betty coughed up something else. Anything you wanna tell me?”
I frown, start to shake my head, and then grimace. Damn. Busted. “Maybe.”
He exhales and drags his hands down his face in that calming technique that tells me he’s fighting the need to punch something. “Baby, you’re really testing my last nerve—”
“Okay! She found me.”
“Just so we’re clear, who found you?”
“Fionnella Smith. Or at least that’s what she calls herself now.” An innocuous name that hides so much more.
Killian snorts. “Do you mean who I think you mean?”
I nod.
He cracks a hint of a smile. “She always had a warped sense of humor.”
“I didn’t think it was funny.”
“I know, baby.”
My heart jerks at the endearment, and I hate myself for loving it so much. “I wish you’d stop that,” I grumble. Just because.
“I can’t help it,” he says simply, the same way he did when he stated earlier that I belonged to him. Killian’s possessiveness is ingrained. Sometimes I wonder why I bother fighting it.
“Try,” I suggest, perhaps a little desperately.
He just stares at me. His eyes tell me he doesn’t want to, and my heart drops a little because I know in that moment I’m in deep trouble. That’s always been our problem. We couldn’t help ourselves, and, ultimately, we didn’t want to. We discovered our weaknesses in each other, and we ruthlessly exploited them.
“How did she find you?”
“She called me a month ago, on my cell. Then, three weeks ago, she just turned up at the club.” I don’t mention Cairo and what Fionnella did for me that day. It has nothing to do with what’s happening now. I hope.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Who the hell is she, really? What’s her role at Fallhurst?” When I first met the woman calling herself Fionnella Smith, I thought she was a handler. But she wasn’t. None of the team knew what her true role was. Or those who did weren’t prepared to divulge it.
“I asked a couple of times. I was stonewalled. I stopped asking.”
“And she didn’t tell you who she was?”
Killian shakes his head, a wry smile curving his lips. “I was too busy playing the nerd to be concerned too much about her name. Plus her evasion tactics are legendary.”
I shudder. “She scares me with all that smiling and all that…joy.”
Killian chuckles. “Yeah, her boundless joy scares me too.”
We share a grin. His gaze drops down my body. His eyes heat up, and the laughter evaporates.
“This was important. And you didn’t tell me,” he accuses with a low, deep voice after a moment.
A tide of guilt rises inside me, and I shift my gaze to a point over his shoulder.
“Look at me.”
I clench my gut hard before I can comply with his command.
“You said Axel knows who she is?” he asks.
I shrug. “Well, she was there to meet with him. If they knew each other beforehand, they were pretending otherwise that day.”
“You know why she came to see him?”
I hesitate. I don’t want to breach Axel’s trust.
“Faith…”
Every time he says that name…my name like that, it’s like a lightning rod to my system. A jolt designed to drag me back to who I was. Who I can never be. “Dammit, don’t keep calling me that—”
“I’m not going to call you ‘B,’” he says with a finality edged in steel. “Your name is Faith. You’ll always be Faith to me. End of story. Now tell me why she was there to see Axel.”
“He has his own punishment room. He has his own ghosts. I think she was there to help him slay a few of them.”
He stares at me for several seconds and then nods. “Did you ask him how he knew her?”
I frown. “I told you. We don’t have that sort of relationship.”
He sighs. “Okay, we’ll assume that was what she was there for, but why did she call you before?”
“She didn’t tell me,” I reply.
Cobalt-blue eyes hook into me. “She didn’t tell you, or you didn’t give her a chance to?”
I’ve entertained that possibility since the nightmare started unfolding yesterday. But Fionnella, as sprightly and maternal as her demeanor conveys, was always a nebulous character. And the impression she left with me, that I owed her one after Cairo, has always lingered in the back of my mind, although it was never vocally expressed. I’m not ashamed to admit that her phone call out of the blue triggered wild panic. And that head-in-the-sand position I adopted is biting me in the ass now.
“I didn’t give her the chance to,” I admit to Killian.
He nods, accepting my explanation without censure. And something soft and vulnerable gives way inside me. God, it’s not fair, what he does to me.
I leave the doorway and walk closer to him, even though the more sensible thing would be to go back to my room and put more clothes on. “How did you find out?”
“I got Betty to back trace surveillance in the streets around the club. There’s footage of her around the time you mentioned. She wasn’t trying to evade the cameras.” He stares at the picture on the screen and shakes his head. “Although, fuck me, what the hell is she wearing?”
I join him at the desk and stare at the familiar figure on the monitor. “Yeah, she turned up looking like a bag lady. I think she gets a kick out of it.”
He relaxes in his seat. “You didn’t happen to keep the number she called you on, did you?”
I shake my head. “Nope, there was no caller ID. And since I didn’t want her to reach me in the first place, I didn’t ask for her number. I even disposed of my phone and bought another one the next day to make it more difficult for her.” A wasted effort, it turned out. My eyes narrow. “Are you thinking of contacting her?”
He shrugs. “I don’t want to waste time on her if she’s not pertinent to what’s happening now.”
“But…you think she is.” It’s not a question.
Another shrug. “I have a feeling we’ll find out soon enough.”