Fucking hell.
At one point in history, her family was the most powerful in the entirety of the goddamn Russian mafia.
Chapter Thirty-One
Lucie
Rough
“Why does the past feel so heavy, so tiring?” I let the question spill out in the air between us. “There was some good stuff. It wasn’t all this attack.”
I listened to him inhale. “The good stuff weighs more,” he said with a heavy sigh and sad, dark eyes. “That’s why it’s easier to run away if you leave it behind. But we still waste ourselves trying to change the impossible, only to end up broken and worthless.”
His words were painful as they filtered through my skin and into my bones. “Grey, you are not—”
“Sorry,” he said too quickly for me to finish my chastisement. “We’re not talking about me. You probably need to rest and, ya know, sort through all this stuff.”
He jumped up from his seat and smoothed the wrinkles on his shirt as he walked toward the front hallway. Confused, it took me a moment before I jumped up and chased after him.
“Stay,” I nearly shouted. I grabbed the back of his shirt and tugged. “Please?”
He stopped but took too long to turn around. I skittered around him and pressed my back to the door as if blocking him.
“I really don’t want to be alone right now,” I said, sounding as desperate as he looked, though perhaps for different reasons. I couldn’t figure out the reason for the dark cloud surrounding him, but its presence pricked my skin. His chest rose and fell quickly as he took in my body with his eyes. When we finally locked eyes, the look in his made me feel like prey.
He slammed into me with his body and I gasped. When he took my lips, the kiss was overpowering and possessive but needy at the same time. I was taken aback, but even more so, it turned me on. Sex was the perfect distraction from my anxiety. And given the handful of experience I’d had with Grey, I knew it would be consuming.
I sucked along his pout, teasing with my teeth. Anything but the present moment was pushed out of mind. He made an almost whine-like sound, but it quickly slid into a hum. The vibrations shimmied down his throat into his chest, deepening the sound and reverberating into my limbs. His touch was, at once, everything.
I kissed him harder, again and again. I jumped up, wrapped my legs around his hips, and locked my feet at his back. I grasped his shoulders, unsatisfied. I didn’t feel close enough.
“I … fuck, I need …,” he said, and the words sounded like they were shredded by rage.
“I know, I know,” I mumbled, fraught with knowledge I wanted reburied. At least, temporarily. “Take it.”
“Lucie—”
“Take it!”
“Fuck, I …” His words were hot, spreading out against my cheeks.
I didn’t understand the torment in his voice. If I let myself think about it, I knew it would frighten me and I couldn’t handle that right now. Instead, I focused on the physical—the light scruff across his chin, slow ripples of muscles sliding under the skin beneath my fingers, teeth scraping my tongue as we kissed. Desperate hands slipped over my ass, holding me firm against him, and continued to climb until his fingers tangled in my hair. He gripped and tugged. An avalanche of tiny stings sprinkled along my scalp and I yelped. He kissed my chin and then my throat while the pads of each finger repented, kneading away the effect of their sin.
Even as I nipped his lips, Grey commanded the kiss, capturing every sound I made. He devoured me mercilessly, taking every inch of me with his palms, his skin, his teeth, his lips.
My heart sparked, unleashing a flood of emotion. Tears rushed silently over my cheeks, wetting his in turn. My skin burned as the world tilted and pitched.
My blouse was torn, shoes were dropped unceremoniously, buttons ripped from their hold to go ticking across the hardwood, and the soft thump of a belt buckle nestled in denim as it hit the floor. He lifted me, flinging one leg over his elbow as he pressed me back into the door. I blinked and was painfully filled with him.
I cried out, but he didn’t stop. His palms were rough against my breasts and skin. I scratched and bit, pushed back hard against him. The way we moved was animalistic—angry, even. My head knocked against the door in the frenzy. I gripped him tightly, my nails digging in his shoulders and my teeth sinking into the soft skin at the base of his neck. Our moans and grunts were mumbled promises and threats, all blanketed under heavy breaths. My louder than usual exclamation and his vehement cursing streak punctuated our respective releases.
Panting violently, Grey dropped slowly to his knees as we slid down the door. His feet were bound at his ankles by his jeans. I settled on his thighs. Our foreheads pressed together as we struggled to slow our breathing and pounding hearts. I lifted my eyes to see his, but they were closed. I wasn’t sure what we were taking out on each other, but it was something yet to be said. I sent apologetic palms over the scratches on his skin, flushed and soft with sweat. An unexpected whimper broke from deep in his chest as if his soul had cried out. His fingers curled around the tops of my shoulders and squeezed.
“I don’t know,” he said, remorseful. “I didn’t mean … I just needed to feel you.”
“Baby, we’re both going through things that are pretty fucked up.” I grabbed his chin firmly and forced him to look at me. “I need you, too. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
He took a deep breath, holding my gaze. His eyes were so clear, I watched the turbulence inside him thunder. “Every time I’ve touched you, kissed you, held you … every single moment I’ve been inside you, I knew it would never be enough. It will never. Be. Enough.”
As I dropped my hand from his face, I watched him apologize to me over and over without once saying a word.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lucie
Dizzy
I pulled him close, trying to avoid crying again. Drained of my energy, my body clearly disagreed and the emotion trickled over my cheeks anyway.
“That’s okay,” I whispered in his ear. “You’ll just have to stay with me forever, then.”
He pushed back, a small, forced smile on his lips as he moved to stand. My stomach twisted when he said nothing. We silently pulled our clothes together and dressed. The air was charged, and it quickly closed around me. I felt a tremor shake my body. My mind began to race as the floodgates reopened.
All of them.
The familiar tickle of electricity began to paralyze my muscles and I fell back against the door dreading what I was about to see. I took a deep breath and let my eyes close.
Grey sets down his bag in the front hall and keys on the counter. His expression is guilty.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he says. “It was the last thing I wanted.”
“Are you okay?” Grey asked as the scene evaporated.
Dizziness tripped me a little, so I steadied myself and walked hurriedly down the hall. He followed close.
“Of course.” What little I saw had made me incredibly nervous.
“Lucie, was that a preview?”
I stopped at the counter, envisioning my keys sitting where he would apparently put them. My fingers ghosted the spot. I braced myself.
“Do you want to leave?”
He stilled, his face going slack. “What did you see?”
“I asked you a question.”
He pursed his lips. “No,” he said in a voice raw with honesty. “I don’t. I may not know what I’m doing, but I don’t want to leave.”
“Then why did I see you give me back my spare keys?”
He swallowed almost audibly. He shook his head though his eyes remained on mine. “You lent me the keys while I went to talk with Drew. This is your place and those are your keys. It doesn’t mean I want to leave.”
I would have felt mollified but for the undercurrent of anxiety. Maybe that was just the barrage of memory coupled with the disconcerting feeling in the preview. I continued into the living room and leaned an elbow on the b
ack of the red chair. Images assailed me behind my eyelids, warping and mangling various pieces of my life together. My body seemed to twitch and jerk like abandoned circuits surging with extraneous voltage. My throat constricted and I choked on the overwhelming need to forget again.
He touched my shoulder tentatively and I felt my shoulders droop. He turned me and pulled me into his arms. We stood there for a while. Something was still off, but at least he seemed calmer now. My body sagged into his unmoving, solid frame. I rose and fell with his chest. Ushering tranquility into my lungs and bleeding out the worry—at least for the moment, I breathed with him. Against his neck, I absorbed the warmth of his skin, pressing my lips against his pulse. His heart under my palm was steady.
“I’m not sure I can process all this. I have all these pieces to reassemble,” I said.
“You don’t have to—not all at once. Or maybe you should call,” he paused and practically coughed her name, “Vivi.”
“I will. Can you just sit with me for a while? Maybe talk some more when I need to?”
“Okay.” Calmer or not, he kept that cool edge.
I wanted to ask if it had anything to do with his conversation with Drew. I assumed it had. I mean, how could it not affect him? At the moment, however, I was too selfish for his attentions and eager to exorcise my own unease.
“I didn’t want to remember.” The confession felt so good as it tumbled out. I was so relieved, my knees buckled. Grey simply lifted me up and enfolded me in his arms as he settled us onto the sofa. This time I surrendered when the tears came.
I closed my eyes to know his acceptance, to drift into recollection and consider why the restoration of my memory in any capacity felt like a burden instead of a relief. I tried to conjure the buoyant moments. Laughing. Smiling. There were some, but nothing that purported an overtone of a joyous life. My “parents” were never incredibly affectionate with me. Until now, that hadn’t occurred to me as something I missed.
I spoke a little more of what came to mind, but so often I felt as if I couldn’t find the words. When I could, they occurred to me in Russian first. Grey only asked for clarification on a few things—names, dates, locations.
“I need some tea,” I declared a bit later. My voice sounded frog-like from all the crying. I moved around the kitchen, preparing a cup of warm comfort and feeling a little like a robot with rusty circuits. When I saw Grey watching me, I paused. “Want some?”
He shook his head minutely while chewing on his lip.
“Are you sure?”
He stayed on the couch, throwing glances over his shoulder at the windows. When I returned, we just sat together for a while, not saying much. I drank my tea. The sound of children on the street was muted through the glass, under the whirr of air conditioning. I was overwhelmed by the continual ebb and flow of my life rushing forward to be reexamined, even though I still felt distant from it all.
“Tell me,” I said as I set the empty mug on the side table.
“About?” Guilt. His voice was steeped in it.
I looked at him and he seemed to force his shoulders away from his ears. His face relaxed. I blinked and swallowed the need to confront him. I still wasn’t sure I could handle it. “You. Growing up—something happy.”
He grumbled and fidgeted, scratching behind his ear. “Happy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
His fingers slipped, perhaps subconsciously, underneath the hem of my top, lightly tracing circles on the skin there. He thought for a while, humming occasionally in thought. I couldn’t discern if they were positive noises, given his ambiguous expression.
“When I was little, my mother baked a lot,” he began, breaking a solid minute of silence. “I always wanted to help because it meant chunks of cookie dough on the sly. And it let me believe I was favored by a parent, even if Drew wasn’t interested in helping.”
“Just eating.”
“Exactly.” He smiled, eyes sparkling just a bit. Worries thawed. “Regardless, it was more or less just me and my mom, and I felt really good. Like it didn’t matter if my dad didn’t like me. Momma loved me.”
“Baby,” I cooed, unable to stop the piteous tone of the endearment. When I looked up, he turned away with a mild snarl falling off his lips.
“Sorry. That’s probably not the kind of story you were looking for.”
“I loved it,” I snapped before he could trample all over the raw emotion, however unintentional.
He smiled, almost shyly. I kissed him on our silently agreed upon favorite spot, behind the ear at the jawline. I sat back to find his eyes. I saw gratitude and such love there—even if he hadn’t said it—that I nearly cried. Again. Thankfully, I was already dehydrated from the prior jag. That wasn’t to say he was peaceful, or still. Whatever still haunted him hadn’t gone anywhere. He cleared his throat and started again, his expression so much lighter, despite the dark cloud tethered to him.
“Maybe a story about the time Nash, Drew, and I got arrested for trespassing and attempted suicide?”
My stomach bottomed out and I sat up straight. “I’m sorry, what?”
He laughed as he held my shoulders still. “It’s nowhere as grim as it sounds, I promise.”
Still skeptical, I relaxed and cozied up to him, intent on watching his face as he recounted the incident.
“First, none of us had any sort of death wish. Second, we were drunk off our asses,” he said. “That part is pretty important to remember here.”
“No shit,” I agreed, smirking in relief and the genuine need to smile.
Chuckling, he continued, “We called the game ‘Hung and Quartered.’”
“Jesus Christ. Nash came up with that, didn’t he?”
“Of course. So, we were up at his family’s cabin near Poughkeepsie one summer and we were stupid bored.”
“And drunk.”
“Quite. Anyway, Nash and I cooked up this moronic idea, Drew and our friend Ben signed on and we were off. We found a small bridge and parked as close as we could get. I had made these genius duct-tape harnesses with the sticky side out. I figured out how to rig them to the side of the bridge while Nash dictated his bullshit rules. Essentially, we bungeed over the side, and once we were dangling from the bridge, we started pelting each other with coins. I have no idea where we got so many quarters. For all I knew, Nash knocked over a bank.”
“Most quarters stuck wins?” I asked. I couldn’t help but to notice the blatant difference in his features. Talking about this had him lit up with joy. He was relaxed and amused.
“Yeah. And it was just Nash and me playing. Drew and Ben passed out in the car. Ben was designated driver, but it was four in the morning and the kid never could hang late.”
“So how did you get arrested?”
His grin was so mischievous, my panties nearly took themselves off.
“When my coins were spent, I realized Nash was out cold, snoring like a logging machine, and probably drooling. I passed out and woke up in a cop car with a bag of ice on my head. Apparently I bumped into the bridge when they were pulling me up.”
I straddled his lap and kissed his forehead. I relished the feel of his hands as they slid around and locked on my hips. “Idiots.”
“Shitfaced idiots, thank you,” he insisted with a crooked smile.
I held his face in my hands and scanned every facet. I tucked a curl behind his ear, and leaned in, and planted a kiss on his lips. To my delight, I got stuck. The press of soft heat from his mouth held me there. I hummed, taking his lower lip between mine. Our embrace constricted to bring us much closer together. With an intense grip, he held me to him as though I were about to run away.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Grey
Balm
Lucie’s warm body wrapped tighter around me, fogging my mind with everything I was about to lose. Her hands settled on my face like a vow, and the heat of what I felt for her seared through my chest. Maybe it was shame—I’d basically come here to wreck her with the
truth.
She gently kissed my lips before tucking her arms between us. “Would you just hold me? My mind is everywhere right now.”
“I’ve got you, my Lu.” I rubbed her back as I held her. “Why don’t you focus on one memory? Tell me something happy.”
She sat silent for quite a while, and the only movement was the push of her breasts against me as she breathed. “I don’t have any good ones.”
I cocked my head to the side. “That’s impossible. How could you be this amazing without a single positive experience?”
“Amnesia was a blessing,” she said, sitting up straight to reveal a gravely serious expression. “It gave me a blank slate for a while. Now, I … I feel like a lie.”
I stared at her, mouth agape, caught between empathy and frustration. “Baby, who you are now? You were always in there. Remember? You were just waiting for a chance.”
She looked through her lashes at me, a slow smile building a bridge to solid ground. She rested her palm over my heart. “I was waiting for you. You are that chance.”
I dropped my head to my chest and shook it. “No,” I said. “I’m not. I am a risk, though.”
The room seemed to empty of air and sound. I squeezed my eyes shut. Then her graceful fingertips lifted my chin, coaxing my darkness toward her light. Soft lips took mine. Gentle arms crushed me closer. Every wordless request, I obeyed. Flushed skin against my skin was comfort. My heart pushed love through my veins with a savage force, leaving nothing but her and her arms around me.
“I love this man.” This angel’s voice fell on my ears as softly as her lips caressed them.
She floored me. I twisted slowly and leaned back, my salvation above me. Always above me, but always with me. Wrapped in each other, we became still. I knew then that I was ruined.
When I’d come back, I intended to keep my promise to Drew and tell Lucie the truth and let the chips fall. I was derailed. Not just by sex, but by something else.
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