“The mind stores the trauma,” he says softly, his lashes lowering and then lifting. “It’s with you forever.”
I have a flickering memory, a recent memory, a trigger in an unexpected, complicated place I shove aside. I focus on him. I need to focus on him. “Spoken like a man with experience.”
He reaches into a box and grabs a bottle of whiskey, removing the cap and slugging back a swallow. That’s his answer, his only answer and sometimes actions mean more than words. He offers me the bottle. I’m a horrible drinker, a truly horrible drinker but I take the bottle and slug it back, choking with the sharp pinch of the amber liquid.
Adrian laughs a deep, masculine rumble, and takes the bottle from me. “You okay?”
“As if you care. You laughed.”
“I care despite my amusement.”
“Hmm. Well. I think I should have stuck to hot chocolate.”
“Why?” he challenges, taking another long slug. “You’re in a cave with a devil. Drink.”
“You’re not a devil.”
“I was,” he says. “I had to be. And once a devil, always a devil.”
“You didn’t kill Deleon.”
“For you.” His eyes meet mine for just a moment before he tips the bottle to his lips and swallows, his chin tilting downward before he adds. “You don’t know what I’ve seen him do.” His gaze finds mine again, almost as if he wants, and even needs, me to see the truth in his face as he adds, “I would have killed him if you hadn’t been there.”
He means it, of that I’m certain. I take the bottle. “Then I guess we’d better hope I make that a good decision.”
I force down another swallow, and this time, the burn delivers a hazy sensation, a lightheaded feeling. I tip the bottle back again in a repeat and the sensation intensifies. My words are looser now, my limits wider. “I imagine your trust is a shiny ball,” I dare, bold enough to meet his stare as I add, “a prize I hunger to be awarded. Close enough to reach up and pluck from the darkness, only to have it dart just out of reach.” I hand him the bottle.
He grabs it and for several beats he says nothing, staring at me, his expression indiscernible, a pulse in the air as he says, “It’s not as simple as me just deciding to trust you, Pri.”
I’m remotely aware of the drip-drop of water nearby, stone to stone, a simple, discernible act of nature much like our attraction. But as he’s made clear, that is where simple ends for us.
But I am just whiskey’d up enough to plow forward, not in the slightest deterred from my mission, a mission I can only call him. I want him to stop seeing me as a person who will judge him instead of a woman who cares about him. “I haven’t trusted anyone in a very long time,” I say softly. “But I trust you.”
“You think this is about trust, but it’s not.”
“Then what’s it about?”
His jaw flexes. “The cold-hearted facts. I did things. Things you won’t like.”
“I did things, too,” I remind him. “Things you won’t like.”
He sets the bottle down. “Pri, damn it—”
“Adrian, damn it,” I snap back.
“You heard what Deleon claimed,” he counters. “Why are you ignoring it?”
“I’m not ignoring it. You won’t talk to me. Not without that immunity agreement. I get that.”
“I will never talk about my brother.” His voice is low, almost what you would call soft, and yet somehow it bands around the words and converts them to pure steel.
That steel cuts through the whiskey haze, but it doesn’t shut me down. “You killed him,” I say. “I know.”
“How would you know that, Pri?”
“It’s bleeding from you. You did it, but unlike what Deleon said, you didn’t enjoy it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you had to come to the cabin to deal with killing a teenager you didn’t even know. There’s no way you weren’t torn up over your own brother.”
His response is to take a long drag of the whiskey before he sets it aside. The next thing I know he’s laying me down, his big body pressed to mine. The delicious weight of him sends a surge of adrenaline pulsing through me. “You think you know me?”
My fingers curl on his cheek. “I know enough.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“I think you’re the one who’s wrong,” I counter.
He doesn’t ask what I mean. His lips lower, lingering above mine, teasing me with a kiss not yet realized. “This right now,” he says softly, “changes nothing.”
And now, I don’t ask what he means. I already know. His demons don’t just dance in his eyes, they dance with us, they mock us. They promise to end us.
And what he doesn’t understand is how little that matters to me. So much so that I can’t wait to meet them up close and personal and tell them, and him, they don’t matter. But he does. So fast, so easily, Adrian matters to me.