Love the Way You Lie(17)

“I’m not going to hurt you.” His gaze remains on me as we stand in front of Candy’s shit-hole apartment building. This building, this ground had seen violence before. I can feel it vibrate through the concrete. And it probably will again—I just hope it won’t be today.

I press my hands together, hating how helpless I feel. “Then let’s walk. In public.”

When he doesn’t answer, I head back toward the club. He falls in step beside me.

Public is a generous term for the street. No one would come running to help if I screamed. But it’s better than letting him follow me home. A whole lot better.

“Relax,” he says, somewhat dry and almost sad. “If I wanted to fuck you, I’d have met you in the club.”

And if he’d wanted to kill me, he could have done it a hundred times by now. He’d followed me here. I’m still alive. But I can’t relax. Not while I’m wondering whether he followed me any other night and what he saw. Who he saw. “Plenty of guys would like a freebie.”

Has he followed me home? I have to assume he hasn’t. I have to believe she’s safe, otherwise there’s no point to any of this.

“I’ll always pay,” he says, and I know he’s teasing a little. But a little bit not. “Cross my heart.”

It’s more than money now. It’s also distance. He’s drawing a line in the sand. He’s telling me he needs that line just as much as I do. “And tip,” I add. Because I can tease too.

His smile always dawns like the morning, slow and warm, wiping away the night’s chill. “Not just the tip, though.”

Oh my God. I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling too. “So what did you want to talk about?”

“Lots of things,” he says, catching my hand. “Like who you’re afraid of.”

I flinch. I’m afraid of Byron. I’m afraid of my father. I’m afraid of everyone. “What makes you think I’m afraid?”

“I know a girl in trouble when I see one. And you’re it.”

“So you’re here to save the day?” More likely he’d get himself killed. Yeah, the man is obviously tough—but my father has a fucking army at his command. Kip should find some other girl to stalk and harass. A different one to use. He should find a different girl to protect. “I can’t be what you want.”

A grim smile flickers over his face. “You really don’t know what I want, sweetheart. You’d be a lot more scared if you did.”

* * *

Six months ago

I’m still facedown on the desk, being pounded, when I hear the door open. I tense. What if it’s a guest? But then I hear the cadence of my father’s gait—one light step, one heavy, one creak of his cane.

Oh God. I pray that he leaves.

Byron doesn’t stop fucking me. His thrusts don’t change at all, not faster or slower. He fucks me like he has forever—and he does. My father can’t stop him. My father won’t stop him.

One light, one heavy, one creak of his cane. My father’s coming closer.

He must see me by now, must know what’s happening. And yet he keeps walking nearer to us. He rounds the desk. Light, heavy, creak.

And stops.

“Sir?” Byron’s breathing is heavy, the word clipped short. It’s a parody of respect, the word sir, as he fucks the man’s daughter over his desk. As his cock invades me, splitting me open.

“Byron.” My father sounds tired and impossibly old. “Our documents. Look at them.”

The documents are crushed in my hands. They are smeared with my mascara that smears across my cheek. They are ruined.

“Almost done,” Byron says on a grunt.

I shiver from disgust, that my father is here watching this, that my fiancé doesn’t seem to mind. I am something worse than a future wife or a beloved daughter. I am a pet, forced to beg and roll over for my dinner. And it’s not even disgust at my father or at Byron that hollows out my stomach—it’s disgust for myself. I let them do this to me. I don’t fight. I can’t fight. It’s not only me who’ll get hurt if I do.

A hand hovers over my head, shaking, trembling. Not Byron’s hand. It’s my father’s.

He always shakes now. The doctors say it will only get worse. It started in his hand, then moved to his legs. That’s when he started using the cane. He would have lost his life too. In his business any sign of weakness can be fatal. Competitors move in, take over. But no one came to kill my father because Byron stepped in.

With my father’s blessing, he’ll take control of the family’s businesses. His marriage to me will solidify the deal in the eyes of the more traditional mafiosos, smooth the way so less people fight it. And my father will get to live out his life in the empire he built, safe and sound and stroking the hair of his daughter as she gets fucked over his desk.