voice grew soft, mournful.
“I’m not talking about the scratches.”
Neither am I...
Unwilling to enter into this conversation, I blew her off. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It’ll be fine.”
I stepped into the closet to slip on a pair of thin sweatpants. Assuming the brat wouldn’t move from her position at my bedroom door, I was surprised to turn and find her at the entrance of the closet, the first aid kit I used to bandage her chin firmly in hand.
Lifting my eyes to her face, I saw an emotion I couldn’t name, thoughts I couldn’t read.
“Let me help you,” she insisted.
“Why?”
Genuine shock overtook me, but then I worried that, despite my warnings, she believed the situation had changed, that what we’d done had somehow broken down the walls that held us apart.
“Because I’m your servant, remember? And you’re bleeding and need someone to help close the wounds.”
I blinked, my brows tugging together because she was actually attempting to fill a role I’d created to hurt her.
This woman.
This Rose.
Intentionally making herself subservient.
Yet, even in that, there was a level of pride that left me breathless.
“They’ll close on their own-“
“Just let me do this.”
Arching a brow in both amusement at her boldness and silent question, I stepped foreword, stole her space, watched as her neck craned up so that she could keep her stare locked to mine.
Such fierce determination inside her, regardless of everything.
“You shouldn’t be around me right now. I’m not safe.”
I wasn’t. My temper was on edge, adrenaline coursing through me that demanded I fuck or fight. One or the other, the violence was always the same.
“You never are,” she whispered.
Leaning down, I brushed my lips against her cheek. “Some times are worse than others.
Her lips parted, the glimmer of moisture lining the fullness of them. Gritting my teeth to keep from knocking the kit from her hands and doing to her all the things I shouldn’t do, I held my body as still as possible.
“You’re fighting tomorrow,” she said, her voice a whisper of sound lingering between us. “And you shouldn’t go into the ring injured.”
That was exactly how I needed to go in. Wild animals are at their most dangerous when injured, they’re at their fiercest. Pain drives the instincts better than any other emotion.
More than love.
More than hatred.
Pain is sharp. It’s overbearing. It dances across the nerves with electric sparks that trick the brain into being overtaken. We are at our base selves when pain creeps in to numb everything else.
Unlike those who do everything to escape it, I’d learned to sip on pain’s robust flavor, I’d learned to forge myself in the fire of its agony and rise from the pile of its ashes.
“Please,” she begged. “Let me do this.”
Lisbeth had been the person to teach me what pain meant; yet I found myself nodding in agreement to let her tend to it and take it away.
“Okay.”
Something rolled behind the blue color of her eyes. I didn’t recognize it. Couldn’t name it, but something had changed.
“Go sit on the bed. It’ll be easier there. Otherwise I’ll have to get a stepladder to climb so I can get to all of it.”
I almost laughed.
She was facing a man who had only been cruel to her, and yet she still had the strength to joke.
It was surprising, her strength. Where others would have buckled, Lisbeth marched on, refusing to bow beneath the weight of it.
Circling her, I refused to release her from my stare. Lisbeth spun as if attached to me by some unseen cord, breathless, her heartbeat erratic from what I could see in the flutter of her neck.
She woke something inside me.
A need.
A pulse.
A driving hunger.
Something so devastatingly dark that I trembled beneath the feel of it.
The want. The desire. The rectification of an insult that had beaten me down with small, petite fists.
I never wanted to feel this way about her. But like always...I watched. I was mesmerized, struggling to find the definition of beauty that was anything more than the small creature standing before me now.
“Sit down,” she reminded me, her voice wavering, tone weak.
She felt it, too...whatever it was.
A tragedy maybe.
That’s what we were.
Destruction and chaos.
The absolute beauty of misery.
Lowering my weight to the mattress, I was hyperaware of her presence, of her delicate energy mingling with the crude and coarse edges of mine.
The mattress dipped behind me, and I closed my eyes, the opening lid of the first aid kit sharp against the tension of our silence, the items banging around as she searched for what