across my body when I tugged it in place only to throw it off an hour later, the room too hot or too cold.
Or maybe that was me.
It wasn’t that I felt bad for what I did to her. No. My conscious was sparkling clean, a surface you could eat from without worry of germs or disease. Hell, I’d killed men for less than what she’d done and felt no regret for doing it.
But as the hours bled on, I grew more aggravated, eventually pushing my body up from the mattress to sit on the side of the bed. Curled forward with my forearms braced on my knees, I stared at the floor beneath me.
She fucking apologized, the words falling so easily from her lips as if they meant something. I wanted to snatch them all up and shove them back inside her. Make her choke on the bitter taste of her lies. They meant nothing, those ignorant fucking syllables, and they hadn’t been what saved her.
Only because I’d never intended for her to stay in that dungeon in the first place.
If I had, she’d still be there. And maybe I would sleep better.
The aggravation of having Lisbeth under the same roof was pushing me in ways that weren’t healthy. My fingers curled into my palms, stretching again with a sickening crunch as I shoved to my feet and stormed away from the bed to take a hot shower. I had to think. Had to loosen the constant strain of tight muscles and a blistering pulse.
Not even the hot water could help leach the tension out of me. I lied to myself as the heat poured over me, swore that it wasn’t her that was crawling beneath my skin. I just needed to fight. Needed to feel the dirt floor of the pit beneath me so I could work out the knots along my spine and silence the whispers in my head.
I needed something. And it couldn’t be found in the lower dungeons. It wouldn’t be found in the gym. But still I knew I would return there to work my body into exhaustion once again.
It wouldn’t be enough. I knew it as I stepped out of the shower and dried off, knew it as I pulled on a pair of athletic shorts and stretched a T-shirt over my chest and shoulders.
I needed to fight. Case closed. The end. It was the only thing that would bleed this hatred out of me enough that I didn’t march through the house to find Lisbeth and wring her skinny neck.
She apologized.
The fucking bitch.
As if an apology would set things right. As if it could wipe away years of treating me like shit and then disappearing after my mother was killed.
Yet, none of that had taken away from my body’s reaction to the sight of her against that pole.
No woman had excited me to this point in the past five years. Yes, when I’d first started fighting, the prize at the end was worthy of my attention, but eventually even that fell flat. Isabelle did a decent job of keeping me in check, but she hadn’t drawn out my violence in a long time.
Not like Lisbeth.
Not like a woman who drove my pulse to pounding and ignited fire inside me unlike anything I’d felt.
I had to think that my violence had multiple facets, one side bloody and the other...
It was best not to think of it because Lisbeth could never fill that need, not with how much I hated her.
Still, I couldn’t get those frightened eyes out of my thoughts, couldn’t stop her voice whispering through my head with the way she’d said please.
Such a simple word, and yet it held so much power.
I had no choice but to avoid her as much as possible. Not if I wanted to keep my head on straight and my dick in my pants.
Once dressed, I stepped into the family rooms to find Franklin drinking his morning coffee and reading the paper. His grey eyes darted to me, the paper crinkling as he folded it to set aside. It was obvious he’d waited to talk, most likely about Lisbeth, but that wasn’t the first thing on my mind.
“I don’t care what you’ve said before. I’ll be in the ring when the fights resume in a few days.”
His expression darkened, disapproval written into every line of his face.
“Although I’m sure you could use the release, I’ll have to insist you change your mind.”