Page 119 of Vicious Kingdom

“Please lift your pant leg, Mr. Baldwin.”

The scream for him to fight this clawed up my throat.

Leo remained still for a heartbeat, before he bent and rolled up the cuff of his pants. He wasn’t fighting. He couldn’t! I clenched my jaw tight, angrier than I ever had been. Leo wasn’t a menace to society. There were real threats out there! And due to some sick, twisted game of power, these men were focusing on him.

The energy swirling off the mobster was dark and violent. He held still as the agent approached. The man had to have a death wish to come at him like this. But Leo didn’t flinch as they clamped the thing around his ankle, but I saw the muscle in his cheek tick once, then go still. The agent who did it was a little too rough, like he wanted to prove a point; the metal made a cold, wet sound as it closed.

“Charming,” Leo said.

“You’re confined to the premises. Leave, and the response team won’t be so polite.”

Leo shook out his pant leg. His nostrils flared. Whatever this game was, he was a master player. His suit was perfect. For all the world, he looked like a man ready for a business meeting, not a sentencing.

The agents retreated. I heard them debrief in the hallway, the echo of boots on polished wood, then the elevator opening and closing. After closing and locking the door, I watched Leo from the foyer, but he stayed where he was, head bent, hands unmoving. When I stepped toward him, he didn’t look up.

My lion…my champion! Ready to defeat my demon but easily caged by his own.

I reached to touch his shoulder. I expected heat, or maybe the shudder of violence under the surface, but his body was so cold and so collected it scared me.

“Leo,” I said.

He looked up, and his eyes were wilder than I’d ever seen them. Wild, but not broken. Just the opposite—there was something in them that scared me more than a gunshot: a glint of calculation, of hunger, like the moment before a predator launches.

I slid closer, pressing myself against him, and wrapped my arms around his shoulders.

“They can’t hold you. They have nothing.” I wanted it to be true, and because I needed him to believe I did.

He let out a slow breath. It was the sound of someone who’d held it for years, waiting for the right moment to exhale. He reached up and laced our fingers together, the chain between us a private thing no one else could see.

“It’s temporary,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was talking to me or himself. “The dealer always gives us a new hand; we are merely players.”

But it felt like forever as we stood there, the metal band gleaming in the foyer light.

The house was so still, after. Even the HVAC seemed to sense the wrongness in the air, shutting itself off in sympathy with our nerves. I stood in the foyer and watched the doors, expecting them to open again, for some other nightmare to step through. But all I could hear was my own blood thundering.

“Come,” Leo said. He shook himself, and in that moment, he remade himself into the version that nothing could touch. He led me up the wide staircase. There was no limp in his step, no evidence he’d been branded with a government shackle.

It made me more than a little sad when we passed the master bedroom.

But it was my own damn fault. I’d drawn a line in the sand, choosing to sleep in the guest room night after night, too chicken shit to ask him to come back and share the bed.

Only…I did sneak into his room. It was the only few hours I slept.

Leo steered me to the guest suite. I paused in the middle of the room, suddenly so tired I thought my knees might give out. He didn’t say anything. Just helped by unzipping the back of my dress.

His hands were steady—no tremor, no hesitation—but I shied away the moment the cool air hit my skin. Humiliation draped over me like a wet blanket, threatening to smother me. That was the worst part about the torment: my inability to stop it.

And now Leo saw that too.

As I peeled the fabric from my skin, he left for a moment, only to return with two electric heating pads. I slid a long sleeper tee over my head and let the material cover the evidence of my own weakness.

“Get into bed,” he said gruffly.

I stepped toward him, reaching for the heating pads. “I can do that.”

He shook his head. “Let me.”

He’d said it so softly I almost didn’t hear.