Page 31 of A Vicious Love

Marcel spoke then, drawing Jamison into a low conversation about the hotel. Harrison joined, his humor gone. Emmie touched my arm and asked about the dress, the flowers, my ankle, anything gentle enough to give me somewhere to look besides Jamison’s back.

For a little while, I was almost okay.

I saw a dark smear across Jamison’s right hand, near the base of his thumb, going up his wrist.

Blood.

He was speaking to Marcel, while his fingers flexed around the glass.

I stared at the smear.

I would bet that blood wasn’t his.

“Jamjam,” I said quietly.

He kept talking.

I took a small step closer. “Jamjam.”

His eyes flicked down to me, sharp with warning.

I held out my hand by instinct, not because I wanted to hold his exactly, but because I needed to show him.

“Your hand⁠—”

“If you ask for my hand one more time,” he said, voice low and vicious. “you’ll get it.”

Everything went far away. The orchestra kept playing. I faintly heard a woman laughed somewhere beneath the dome.

You’ll get it.

Jamison’s hand.

The one I held in my lap while I traced tattoos and pretended I was not begging for evidence that he could be gentle.

My first thought was stupidly clear.

I wouldn’t survive his hand.

He was so much bigger than me.

So much stronger.

One hit from Jamison Crow would not be a slap in a dramatic story. It would be shock and the whole world going white. My body learning exactly how much violence he had kept out of reach until now.

I had never considered that before.

Jamison frightened me. He humiliated, snarled, forgot me and made me feel like a burden he had inherited with a family contract.

But physically?

No.

Some naive part of me had always believed there was a hard line there. He would not cross it. Now I stood beneath a ceiling full of false stars, and wondered how foolish I was.

Jamison realized what he had said almost as soon as the words left his mouth.

The fury did not disappear, exactly, but something cut through it. His eyes sharpened on my face, then dropped to my body as if cataloguing the way I had gone rigid.