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“Freya, why in the fuck didn’t you leave when I told you to fucking leave?” He was seething, holding my hips tight. He hadn’t stopped touching me since the gun went off. I was grateful for that since I was pretty sure that his hands were holding me together.
My body was trembling under Hades’s touch. The harder I tried to make it stop, the harder I shook. I tried to focus on Hades, his eyes, his downturned lips, his milky skin. He was pissed off. That was good. Pissed off was something I could work with in that moment. That meant I could also be pissed off instead of falling apart.
“Why the fuck would I leave?” I replied with bite.
“Because I fuckin’ told you to.”
“Because you told me to?” My brows all but flew up into my hairline. “Well, if I’d done what you told me to do, you may not be standing here right now.” As pissed as I was, the mere thought of what could’ve happened had the world tilting beneath my feet.
“If things had gone a little bit different, and I mean if that bullet was a few fuckin’ inches to the left, you’d be dead,” he forced out. “I’m gonna do my best to make sure you’re never in a situation like that again, but if shit happens, you’re gonna do what I fuckin’ say.”
“Did you hit your head at some point tonight?” I scowled, rolling my eyes, anger completely and utterly taking the place of the shock.
“This is not a fuckin’ joke, Freya,” he scowled, making it clear that he was not amused. His hands tightened. “Need to hear you tell me you get me on this.”
“I will not,” I scoffed, stepping out of his arms so I could fold my arms and say with my body what my tone and face were saying. He was really starting to piss me off.
Hades was having none of that, striding over to hold me once more.
As if a switch had been flipped, I broke. All the strength I’d been clutching with a death grip vanished. “You want me to walk away when we’re in a situation like that?” I countered, my voice shaking. “That’s never going to fucking happen. I may not have the skills, I may not be brave and badass, but I’ll never leave you when you’re in danger. I’ll fight for you. Despite what you try and order me to do. I’ll fight for you.”
Hades froze at my words, something I couldn’t define passing over his face. Then he pulled me to him, pressing his lips to mine.
I relaxed into the kiss, lost myself in it. I would’ve been willing to drown in it had he not pulled back.
“I’m an enforcer,” he murmured against my lips. “My job is to fight for the club. Kill for the club. Die for the club if need be. I fight for them. My brothers. No one has ever fought for me.”
My heart shattered then, into a thousand and one tiny pieces. He spoke in that same deep tenor I’d grown accustomed to, iron ever-present in his voice. There was nothing soft, nothing vulnerable about his voice. But I knew him well enough to hear them. The cracks. The deep chasms between them.
I lifted my hand to cup his jaw. “Honey, you’ve never had me before. I’m going to fight for you.”
Emotion swirled in his eyes. Emotion that shattered those thousand and one tiny pieces into another thousand and one tiny pieces.
“Who was she?” As much as I’d wanted this moment to last forever, this question had been burning in my throat, and I couldn’t hold onto it for a moment longer.
Hades sighed. He’d had to have been expecting it. Dreading it, by the looks of it. “Someone from my past.”
I waited for him to expand, but he just kept staring.
“Honey, she almost killed you. I killed her...” My voice broke a little on that, and Hades’s jaw contracted, but I held it together. “I’m going to need a fuck of a lot more detail than that.”
His eyes searched mine, as if he was searching for a way out of this. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how much to tell me.
“Everything,” I stated firmly. “I need everything, Hades.”
“She was the one person I cared about ... before you,” he answered after sucking in a deep breath. “Because she hated the world just about as much as I did. Because she was a fucking knockout at sixteen, and I was a teenage boy who wanted to fuck because I thought that would make me a man.”
He paused, looking at me from beneath his dark lashes. “You sure you want to hear this ... now?”
I gritted my teeth. No, I really did not want to hear how the woman who had been lying dead in my living room up until about an hour ago was the only person in Hades’s young life that he’d cared about. And, by the sounds of it, the girl he’d lost his virginity to.
