Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,30

nothing to feed me.

If we weren’t in this stupid situation, we might have been friends. Lovers for as long as we could make it work because we were the same kind of people. The same sort of wild and alone. This thinking was dangerous, I knew. I had no business feeling any kind of kinship with him.

The only smart thing was to think of him as a tool. Like a hammer or a bomb. A blunt object to inflict upon my enemies. A key to get me into Jennifer’s cage.

He was inanimate but ruthless, and I would use him like I had to.

That made me feel better. It made me feel cold and capable.

“Joan?” His voice was rough and deep. He lifted his hands to rub his eyes but the handcuffs stopped him.

“Morning, Max.” I licked my spoon. “How are you feeling?”

“I’d feel a whole let better if you let me go.”

“Not going to happen.”

He lifted his free arm. Stretched. Made a fist out of his hand and then relaxed it. “What’s your endgame here, Joan? You’re going to keep me locked up here forever?”

“Only until you give up on this revenge idea.” And agree to my plan.

“Not going to happen,” he parroted my words back at me.

I tossed him yesterday’s paper, turned open and folded to the three pictures of the men arrested in connection with the bombing.

I ate my yogurt while Max read the article.

“Grapes, BLJ, and Clock,” he said, tossing the paper aside. “So what? They didn’t do it. Sooner or later they have to let them go. Zo can’t make that shit stick just because he wants to.”

“I don’t know, you Skulls are pretty sticky when it comes to this stuff.” He made a slight face like he couldn’t argue with me. And he couldn’t.

“No word about Rabbit, though,” I said.

“He’s hiding out somewhere. I’ll find him.”

“And what?”

“What do you think?”

Murder him.

“And then what happens? You go to jail?”

“Only if I get caught.”

For a moment, sympathy poured through me, tenderizing me toward Max. Weird, I know.

I had incredibly little in common with other people. Like nothing. Kids, husbands, new cars, or hair extensions. All the shit other people in my life cared about, I couldn’t relate to.

But I knew what it was like to have your focus get so narrow that nothing else mattered. Getting my sister free was all I thought about. All I cared about. For seven months. Day and night, all I did was eat and breathe my plan to get Jennifer safe.

Max had that tunnel-vision look in his eyes, and I had no idea how I was going to convince him to give up revenge.

Well, I sort of had an idea. I just didn’t know if it was going to work. I was counting on that one dance and several months of chemistry. And a little gratitude for saving his life.

“How’s the head?” I asked.

“Better.”

“Ribs?”

He shifted in the bed and only barely winced. “Better.”

Good. This was…good.

“You think you could eat some soup without spilling it all over yourself?”

“I think I could teach you a lesson about having a smart mouth.”

I hummed in my throat as if disappointed in him and then dug up another spoonful of yogurt and put it in my mouth. He watched every motion. My tongue. My hands. He missed nothing.

And maybe it was because he was imagining what it would be like to kill me.

But I preferred to think he was wondering what it would be like to fuck me.

It was a long shot considering his injury, the fever, his being handcuffed to the bed. But I was banking on him being a dude.

A simple, stupid dude.

And the white bikini. I was banking on the white bikini pretty hard.

“You hungry?”

“No.”

“You need to pee? I’ve got another water bottle—”

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged.

He lifted his eyebrows at me and slowly pushed himself up farther up the bed. He leaned against the cast-iron headboard, exposing all of his skin, which was covered in dark tattoos. He looked like some kind of leopard. Some sleek animal that if unchained would tear me apart.

He would tear me apart.

The tremor I felt in my stomach was part fear and part desire. Which was exactly the mix I liked with men. It was why I had only slept with women lately. Because my compass, when it came to men, led me into dangerous places.

With women—I was the dangerous place. The risk.

A far easier dynamic to survive.

“It’s too late to play stupid,” Max said, jangling