But more than all of those injuries to my body, I felt the weight of the warm, tanned hand, decorated with various gold rings, resting on my chest.
I wasn’t imagining it.
Esme had done all this.
And she was still here… in my bed.
Fuck.
My throat was on fire. Needing water, I tried to shift to reach the bottle that sat next to me on the floor, pain ripping through my muscles.
“Quinton?” Her voice was so soft and textured, like the finest silk against my ears.
Her fingers trailed off my skin, leaving fire burning in their wake. She rose up over me, her hair falling in thick waves around her gorgeous, concerned face and onto my chest.
“Water,” I rasped, the two syllables searing my throat.
Nodding quickly, she was careful as she bent over me and still, I couldn’t stop my hoarse groan.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she quickly pulled back, uncapping the water.
She hadn’t hurt me, too careful for that. But having her so close to me, in my bed… having to watch her full breasts push against her top and the gold chains on top of them… the sight was both heaven and hell for me.
My chin dipped and before I could extend my hand, she held the bottle up to my lips and urged me to drink.
Holding her gaze, I complied, gulping down the water until it was completely gone, the cool liquid soothing my parched throat.
“Are you okay?” she murmured, folding her legs under her. “How do you feel?”
I watched her eyes examine me and my wounds.
“Did you do this?” I rasped.
Esme licked her lips and nodded.
“You cut off my clothes and bandaged me?” I asked again, grimacing at the bite in my tone.
“Well you certainly weren’t the one to do it,” she quipped as her eyes snapped to mine. “You passed out in the stairwell. Thank God I was here or you probably would’ve bled out.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t have—”
“I need to change your bandage,” she cut me off, insistently.
I opened my mouth to protest, but she was already over me and digging through the first-aid box for a new pack of gauze.
“How do you—” I hissed as she began to peel the bandage tape from my skin and began again, “How do you know how to do this?” I watched her warily.
She removed it all before looking at me and making a point of rolling her eyes. “I Googled it.”
“Mon Dieu…” I breathed, feeling the air on my wound. “You Googled how to take care of a knife wound?”
Esme huffed, color rising to her cheeks. “Well, what else was I supposed to do? Call an ambulance? I take it from the fact you chose to return to the church rather than an emergency room that you’d rather I didn’t do that… Unless you were planning on dying and figured coming back to the church was the most efficient way to—”
“No,” I bit out, holding back a chuckle because I knew it would hurt. “No, I wasn’t planning on coming back here to die.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” she murmured as she peered at my side. “Do you think you need stitches?”
Turning my head, I examined the gash in my skin. His knife hadn’t been as big as mine, but it still caused a decent-sized slice into me.
“I checked for all the signs of internal bleeding, and since you’re awake now, I think it’s safe to assume he missed all the vital parts.” I tensed as she wiped some of the dried blood from around the edges.
“There are sutures in the kit and a hemostat.”
Her eyes whipped to mine and the warm natural tan of her face paled into a ghastly white. I began to laugh before I remembered it was a bad idea.
Drawing my lips into a tight line, I informed her, “I can stitch it myself, if you can just get me the stuff.”
She gulped and complied with my request.
This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with a wound that required a few stitches, and I knew it wouldn’t be my last.
Hazards of the job.
“Lock the end of the needle, just before the thread, into the hemostat,” I instructed, and a few seconds later, she held out the secured suture in her hand she fought to keep from shaking.
Murmuring my thanks, I took it from her with my right hand and positioned it at the end of the wound.
A low groan boiled up from my chest as the needle pierced my skin.
“You don’t have to watch,” I said tightly, seeing how she stared.
Color returned to her face—it always did when she was determined to defy me. “I do,” she stated. “You’d think with all the piercings I have, this would be easy to see.”
“Last I checked, piercings don’t close open wounds,” I grunted, pulling the thread through and tying off the first stitch.
Instead of handing me the scissors, she held them to the knot and snipped the ends herself.
“Who were those men?” she asked quietly as I moved on to the second stitch.
My jaw tightened, not from the needle this time though.
“Bad men,” I hissed, the needle sliding again through traumatized flesh.
“I assumed,” she replied smartly, pulling her hair over one shoulder and twisting it around itself as though she felt naked without her scarf on her head. “Were they responsible for the explosion?”
I glanced up to her and nodded. “They were responsible for the whole fucking thing.”
Her thick sculpted eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
I groaned, tying off the second suture. “They started the riot, Esme. They were responsible for the entire thing.”
“Why?” she gasped. “Why would someone do that? We were… We were just playing music…”
“Not about you,” I grunted, feeling the sweat break out on my brow only moments before her hand reached up with a cloth and wiped my forehead. “Those men… they work for a man—a man who rules the Parisian underworld. Marcel Méchant. A man whose only goals are money and power… and in order to gain power, he has to take it from someone else.”
“But it was the Neuf Trois. What could he possibly hope to take from those people that hasn’t already been taken?”
Whether or not I would’ve bled out on the steps was immaterial. The simple truth was she came here to help me and may have saved my life. For that, I owed her as much of the truth as I could give her about what she’d witnessed.
“He wasn’t trying to take from them. He was trying to take what any development… any progress… in that area would be seen as…”
“A success for Macron,” she finished.
I tipped my head in agreement. “Méchant is the head of the largest criminal organization in France. Part of it might be similar to the mob—gambling, contract killing, drugs, prostitution… But Méchant is after more than just profits. He wants power. He wants the power of the presidency.”
Her chin dipped and she cut the next stitch off for me.
“Little by little, he’s incited domestic troubles and incidents of terrorism since Hollande stepped into power, slowly but surely, turning Paris… the French public… against the man they elected.”
“But why not step in when Hollande refused to run again?”
My mouth thinned. “Méchant could never run himself. Though I can’t imagine any of his criminal acts have made it onto his record, he’s done nothing good that would convince the country to vote for him. And this isn’t Russia, he can’t run on fear.” I cleared my throat, tying off the last stitch and holding the strings up for her to cut. “No. He picked someone… a presidential pawn who he’s been shaping in the public eye for many years.”
I felt her wide eyes on me, knowing the information sounded as though it was pulled straight from a James Bond movie rather than the lips of a scarred recluse living in a famous cathedral.
“Do you know who it is?”
I held her gaze for a moment before replying with, “You should put the gauze back over it now.”
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That much information would put her at risk.
“Oh, right.” A few seconds later, she’d replaced the moistened gauze over my stitches and taped it down to my skin. “Do you want something for the pain?” she asked as she stood and grabbed another water bottle for me.
My tongue drew over my lower lip, tormented by the proximity of her body and how I wanted to drink from it.
“Nothing that I should take,” I replied tightly, dragging my gaze away from her.
“And how do you fit into this?” The mattress sank and I watched in horror as she straddled over me, my cock straining against my pants that she’d already half carved away. “Who are you, Q? And why are you responsible for stopping those men?”
If she meant to harm me, she wouldn’t have saved me.
But if she saved me, then why did she lie about who she was?
The monster in me shored his defenses. The monster who’d had the people he lived ripped from his life without warning. The monster who’d learned that being skeptical to the point of solitude was better than the surety of being screwed.
“I could say the same of you, Madame St. Claire.”
She drew back, stunned. “I don’t understand. I’ve told you—”
“Who you were after the age of eighteen,” I finished for her.
Her spine stiffened and her whole body stilled.
It was the secrets we kept closest that were the hardest to share—not because of the threat they posed but because of the pain one had to wade through to get to them.
“How did you know that?” she whispered.
“Because I am who I am,” I replied sternly, my implication clear. Before I shared my secrets, I required hers as payment.
Her head jerked down, her chest bouncing as she drew and unsteady breath, digging through her past that she’d buried deep.
“My mother was Indian and my father from Pakistan,” she began with a low but firm voice. Even at her most vulnerable, she was still strong. “They met here, while at college, and fell in love.” A small smile flitted over her face. “This was probably the only place such a thing could happen, since many of the people from those countries hate one another.”
It seemed fitting that star-crossed lovers had produced a woman equally as vibrant and beautiful. And hard to contain.
“They fell in love and had me. My mother’s parents passed away right after I was born, but my father’s family… he’d kept my mother’s heritage from them. When I was six, my father offered for his brother, my uncle to come stay with us to see if he wanted to study in the States.” She stopped and shuddered. “I remember the yelling when he was introduced to my mother. I don’t remember what was said, I just remember how loud they got—how angry he was.”
Her face became shadowed.
“He left and, in spite of my father’s attempts to reason with him, returned to Pakistan within the week.” I caught the way her eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, trying to hide how the story brought her to tears. “My mother… My mother suggested that they both go back—that they go together to meet my grandparents, to show them the truth of their relationship before my uncle tainted it with radical hatred and lies.”
She paused, lost in a story that was wiped from her past.
“Esme…”
“So, they left,” she began again. “They flew to Pakistan and left me with Ginger, the elderly woman who would babysit me sometimes. And, when they got there, someone rigged the car picking them up with a bomb. There was no chance.” Mon Dieu. “One of the extremist terrorist factions claimed the attack later that day. But here, it was just one more act of terror in the Middle East. And one more orphan left behind.”
The raw pain that bled into her voice hurt worse than anything else my body had ever felt.
“That’s why you played for those kids…”
She nodded. “I know what it’s like to be them.”
Nagging through my sympathy was the question that she hadn’t answered, “But why did you change your name?”
Her gaze drew wide as her head tipped to the side, like she was so lost in the tragedy of her parents she couldn’t process my request.
“Remember one of the first times we spoke… argued… about being judged by our appearances?”
I nodded.
“It’s not just how I look,” she said softly. “I leap frogged through the foster system because terrorist attacks in the world went up and no one wanted a child that would forever be suspicious simply because of her nationality, or even a threat because of my past.”
Here, she paused and looked away from me. I couldn’t tell if it was shame or another secret that kept her eyes away.
“Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it was a sign of weakness or rebellious youth. But I was tired of it. I was almost eighteen and about to pay my own way through college, and I was tired of being judged from the moment someone saw my last name—a moment which sometimes occurred even before they met me.”
She turned to me and slid closer on the bed, leveling her face with mine.
“Because it only took changing my name to turn me from potential extremist to polished exotic,” she replied bitterly, her eyes glinting as though fueled by tiny gilded lightning bugs inside them. “Is that what you wanted to know, Monsieur Gargouille? Did you want to hear about the little girl who was too weak to even keep her family’s last name?”
Bile rose in my throat. She egged me on. She pushed and pushed, trying to force her self-judgment from my lips.
“I wanted to know the truth,” I rasped. “The truth about the little girl who lost her family and did what she had to in order to survive. I wanted to know the truth behind the woman so strong and determined, she didn’t shy away from the monster in the shadows, even when he threatened to kill her.”
Her lips quirked on one side. “Or kiss her,” she murmured with a voice thickened by an entirely different emotion.
I couldn’t stop my gaze from wandering to her lips. Their fullness no longer covered with the dark purple lipstick she’d worn onstage last night, instead their deep dusky brown beckoned me to the point where I wondered if I should’ve been stabbed weeks ago, because it seemed to be the only thing able to keep me from her.
“I’ve told you my past.” Her tongue dipped out to moisten her lower lip and I felt my pants straining over the length of my dick which had no concern for how mutilated the rest of my body might be when it was around Esme.
“Tell me who you are, Q,” she pleaded. “Tell me why you killed those men.”
The warm sunlight of dawn filtered into the space, filling it with a brightening, yet murky haze, the kind that suggested a new day was here but was uncertain as to what would become of it.
I heard the breeze as it blew through the old wood of the rafters in the attic, new air mingling with the dust of the old.
I’d lived in this place for so long, so alone, and now she was here with me. She’d wondered and asked, tempted and taunted, and finally, saved the man, knowing he was a monster.
And in that moment, I gave in to it all.
To everything beyond revenge. Beyond the judgments I’d passed on myself. Beyond my fears.
I gave into her.
“Marcel Méchant, the man responsible for all of this evil and injustice, married my mother.” Her lips parted in a silent gasp.
Wincing, I pushed myself up, propping the pillow behind my back and against one of the support beams that rose to the roof.
“He is my stepfather.” The words were like battery acid on my tongue. “And he’s the man responsible for killing her… and for scarring my face.”
Her hand cupped over her mouth, and just like every other emotion that my gypsy wasn’t ashamed to conceal, her pain for me spread like a rainbow of remorse over her face.
“Quinton…” She shook her head.
“As far as for why I killed those men… how I killed those men,” I cleared my throat. “My real father works for a French intelligence agency,
one similar to an off-record faction of the FBI, we straddle the line between being validated by the state and operating as vigilantes for the sake of national security.”
Even though I’d already told her he hadn’t been a part of my life, I recounted briefly about how he approached me at eighteen to work with him and I’d turn him down.
“If Méchant had just brutalized my face.” I dragged my fingers down over my scars. “I don’t think I would be here right now, sacrificing everything in order to end him. But, when he had his men hold my mother down over the vigil candles, burning her alive…” I trailed off, the scent of smoke and burned flesh just as potent in my nostrils as it had been that night.
“How could he do such a thing?” she croaked. “Why?”
This time when I laughed, the pain came from a much deeper place than the wound in my side. “Power. It’s always about power for him. And having me on his side gave him access to the Valois. And when my mother figured that out, she tried to warn me… and we both suffered the consequences.”
Her brow furrowed, and I felt her eyes paint warm strokes as they drew over the scars on my face.
“Can I touch you?”
I sucked in a breath.
Say no.
Say no, Bossé, because you might not survive it.
“When has what I said ever stopped you?” I rasped, my whole body aching to feel the warmth of her fingers on my damaged skin.
“Please…” she pleaded.
My lips drew into a thin line, knowing there was no going back after this.
I could only manage a brief nod. “But I can’t promise I won’t bite,” I said with a deep, drawn voice. “No one has touched me before.”
Not my scars. Not even the doctor.
Too enraged and too ashamed of what I’d done and what I’d lost, I’d insisted on taking care of the burn wounds myself, allowing the Valois doctor to only instruct me on what to do. And the longer it went after that, the less and less people saw them, let alone got close enough to touch.
The Gargoyle and the Gypsy: A Dark Contemporary Romance (The Sacred Duet Book 1) Page 25