His eyes never leave mine, while my gaze has a hard time staying on the one spot. When his shirt becomes another heap of material on the floor, my body hums in excitement at the anticipation of seeing Kai’s skin.
Over the years our moments together have had too many unspoken rules and restrictions. Stolen moments. Rushed moments. Forbidden moments. But none of them were ever enough.
None of them ever allowed me to see all of him.
We have so much to get through, so many things he needs to explain, but when he reaches for the button on his pants, arousal swims in my veins, and I have to physically stop myself from offering to take them off for him.
Inhaling loudly, I try to keep control of the situation, try to keep my face indifferent. “What are you doing, Kai?”
With nothing left but his tight black briefs outlining his straining cock, and every inch of his designer-marked skin on display, he casually takes a seat on the sofa behind him.
“I’m helping you piece the puzzle together,” he says nonchalantly, his body comfortably sinking into the furniture. “Did you know I carved several of my tattoos on every single one of those men’s bodies?”
With no other choice but to kneel, my eyes are at perfect height to the designs etched onto Kai’s chest. Looking for a clue, or a trigger––something that will help me remember. My eyes dart around from piece to piece, my fingers itching to trace his skin, and for the first time in forever, I give in to the impulse.
I know he said several, but there’s only one that catches my eye. As if I knew it was there all along, I gravitate to the three-dimensional heart that sits in the middle of his chest. The attention to detail is phenomenal—every artery, aorta, valve and vein where it should be.
Kai’s breath hitches, and his skin pebbles under my touch as my large fingers follow the drawing. Over and over again.
A reel of pictures flash through my mind as I remember the exact same heart cut into the skin of all the men he killed. It was one of the many similarities that linked the bodies to the one killer, but because I’d never seen the tattoos that Kai’s clothes hid, I couldn’t associate him with the killings.
Continuing to touch him, I ask again, but this time I feel like I understand the situation a bit more, and I’m pre-empting his answer. “Why’d you do it?”
“I hated them,” he says quietly. “Every one of those men had you in ways I never did. In ways I never would.”
Skirting around a lifetime of feelings, I didn’t realize we’d both been hurting. I knew there was something there. I felt the connection between us from the second our father told me he was planning to sell Kai to the men he sold organs to.
Kai was young and healthy, and they needed someone to fly under the radar.
They wanted someone who wouldn’t be missed.
Someone who wouldn’t garner a concerned crowd or media attention.
And of course, our father chose the son he never wanted. We’d been brothers since we were eight, and there wasn’t a single day my father didn’t remind him he wasn’t his. And when Kai’s mother died, the amount of people who cared if Kai went missing dwindled significantly.
The only thing daddy dearest didn’t anticipate was me. With both a threat and a promise, I stole my father’s business from under his nose and made a deal with the devil.
My father wasn’t a weak or stupid man, but I was smarter. And when he was left with nothing, he warned me.
“Watch your back, son, because revenge is like a thief in the night, and I’ll be waiting in the shadows to rip away the very thing you love the most.”
I always knew he meant Kai, so I did my best to stay away. To keep a safe distance. If I didn’t love him, I couldn’t lose him.
Absentmindedly, my fingers detour from the heart tattoo and continue to explore the rest of the drawings on his chest, hoping to recognize more.
Knowing there’s nothing left but the truth between us, I flick my gaze up to his. “You know those men meant nothing to me, right?”
He gives me a brief nod. “I think that’s what hurt the most. I wanted to make them suffer for having something that was mine.” My heart trips over his possessiveness. “And I wanted…” His