“Scarlett.”
Razors. Fucking razors down my spine to hear him say my real name. He never called me by my real name. Not since the day we met two years ago when I came walking out of my dad’s office and he came walking out of interrogation.
I’d been ‘Red’ from the start, and the fact that he was calling me by my name now made my heart stop, and not how I longed for it to.
Balling my fists together and trying to hold the flames beneath my palms in place, I turned around to him.
“You’re seriously going back to that room?” he asked, disbelief creasing his forehead.
Nope.
“Yup.”
He held my stare on a thin line, knowing I was lying, knowing I was just trying to get away from him so I could run off and die without supervision.
During the few seconds of our silent war, a spark went off in his eyes, and I curled my toes into the floor.
Demitri and I never fought. Not once. We’d come close a couple times, but he always let whatever we were almost about to fight over go. He wasn’t a person who easily lost his cool, whereas I couldn’t keep the fucking lid on my anger from popping off if someone just looked at me wrong.
He was cool. I was hot. It’s why we worked. I was lava—boiling, racing, intent on destroying—and he was the chill of the ocean that turned me to rock. Demitri made me into something stable.
Worry that our first fight would be the last thing he remembered about me stirred in my gut. For a hot second, I thought I might be sick.
Then that worrisome spark fighting in Demitri’s stare vanished as he blinked it away. He got up off of the bed, his abs pulling taut as he stood up.
“Fine,” he conceded. Thank fuck.
“But I’m walking you back to that room.”
Well, shit.