that only after meeting twice, not counting this time, he’d gotten underneath my skin.
“No!” Harrison roared, about to get to his feet.
I stuck my finger in Harrison’s wound, making him stay put, because the animal had scented blood and he was ready to shed more. Harrison growled again, the pain making all of the color drain from his face, and I looked the marauder in the eyes.
“I’m going to kill you regardless.”
“You kill me.” Cash shrugged. “My brother will continue to kill your family.”
Our eyes held, and something told me he was bluffing, but I couldn’t take the chance. He had shot my brother like it was nothing, like it was something he did every day, and maybe he did. I knew he’d kill my brother in front of me, and the more trouble I gave, the further I’d run and hide, the more he’d go on a spree and kill the people I loved the most.
I didn’t have much time to figure this out, because I didn’t trust him enough not to shoot my brother on his other shoulder, waiting for me to agree to whatever he wanted from me. He’d said that I was his already, he’d already decided, but the question kept stabbing me. Why?
Why me?
He didn’t want my body. I highly doubted he wanted my love.
What else?
What could he possibly want?
Something about a heart.
My heart?
How can someone steal a heart and not expect to love?
I almost growled in frustration. Think, Kee. Think!
I couldn’t.
He was staring at me, and fear was the only thing I felt. Not for me, but for my family. My brother kept bleeding.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “I’m yours. Whatever you want.”
“Kee,” my brother said, and my name on his lips almost made me come apart.
The marauder took a knee next to my brother, patting him on the shoulder. He handed him a glass of whiskey before he set a handkerchief against the wound, over my hand, helping me staunch it. I almost took it away, but I refused. I wasn’t going to let him rattle me. Or allow him to see it.
He thought he could steal my heart?
I met his green eyes and grinned. Game on, you marauding bastard. There was more than one word for vengeance, and getting even sounded just as sweet.
I wasn’t sure how it happened, but the worst day of my life had also become my best.
After Cash drove my brother to the ER, where we fed them some bullshit lie about a robbery gone wrong, and they took care of him, I received a call about a part on Broadway I’d been after. The name of the show was The Blood Queen, and it was based off of a script that felt eerily close to my own life.
That line about art imitating life had never felt so true.
I’d be playing the part of Joan McDougal, a Scottish maiden who refused to marry for the sake of family and obligation. She wanted to marry for love, if she ever married at all. She gave her parents a choice. She’d either marry for love, or she’d bleed her heart dry with an arrow before she settled for anything less. That way, if there was no other way, the man who made her a bride out of obligation would get a raisin instead of a heart.
Was it melodramatic?
Overtly, but my current state of mind was not being rational. I was being forced into marriage by a marauder who couldn’t care less about me.
I studied his face as he drove us home from the hospital. This man had a reason for each of his steps, and I knew I was nothing but a conquest that was going to move his journey along in some way. I still couldn’t piece it together, though.
I hated to sound like a broken fucking record, but why me?
Cash hiring my brother was no accident or coincidence. The cemetery. Showing up at the fair under the guise that he wanted to meet me.
This plan of his had been in play for a while, based on the timeline, but he had just decided to act on it. What had changed?
Why me?
WHY ME?
As he pulled up to Harrison’s car outside of his building, he said he wanted to speak to me alone. Harrison refused to get out of the car at first, but after I told him to go or I’d stick my finger in his wound again, he got out and waited by his car.