“Maybe you should let me try.”
He narrows his eyes. “What’s your game, Renata?”
The sound of my name on his lips feels like an electric bolt straight to the heart. I can’t decide if I enjoy it more than I hate it. But whichever one of those it is, the result is the same—it shatters every bit of willingness I have to play this game.
Kian O’Sullivan might kill me tonight.
But he will never strip my dignity from me.
My mask of seduction falls away. “This is my game,” I tell him.
Then I spit in his face.
He roars and recoils at once with a curse in some language I don’t understand, wiping the spit from his eyes.
I brace myself for his anger. After an insult like that, I know he’s going to make me pay. I’ve spent a lifetime with my brother, and I know that men like him hurt anything that defies them.
The question is, where will he hit me?
Drago liked to slap me across the face. That was the most humiliating. My ex-husband, on the other hand, preferred to slug me in the stomach. Left fewer visible marks that way.
I can’t decide which way Kian will lean. So I close my eyes and tense my stomach.
But then I hear an unexpected noise—footsteps whispering away. And Kian O’Sullivan walks out of the room without a word. Leaving me braced for a hit that never comes.
Somehow, that hurts worst of all.