I give Greta another full day off and I spend the next day with Cassia as well. And then the next. But by the end of the weekend, something much deeper than frustration begins to grow within me. Resentment of the truth? Knowing that what I want so badly, in reality I can’t have? And to make matters worse, I begin to realize that just because something good is standing in front of me, I can’t so easily forget who I really am inside. The need to pacify my vengeance and bloodlust is growing strong again—stronger now that my darkness feels threatened by something more powerful that is trying to hold me back, to keep me from being me. And the only thing that’ll quiet the brutal voice in the back of my mind is to find an unwilling participant and do what I do best.
I’m trying so very hard to ignore it.
Cassia sits beside me on the arm of the leather chair in my living room. Her fingers wind gently in top of my dark hair.
“Can I ask you something?” she says suggestively as I’m glimpsing her naked thighs on the thick chair arm beside me.
“Of course,” I tell her.
I keep my eyes on the iPad in front of me on the coffee table, trying not to let myself become distracted by her.
But like ignoring my dark side, that’s not so easy to do.
“How did you make love to Seraphina?”
My eyes shut in a soft, brief moment of regret. Cassia’s fingers continue to wind through my hair, sending shivers down the back of my neck.
“I think it’s better we don’t talk about her.” I run my fingertip over the screen, pretending to be pre-occupied. But all I can think about is the way her skin smells and how warm her hip is pressed against my arm.
“What was she like? In bed, I mean.”
“Cassia—.” I stop myself from sounding angry and let my breath out in a heavy sigh. “Please, you promised you wouldn’t do this.”
She slides off the chair arm and straddles my lap.
I swell uncomfortably beneath the fabric of my pants, but I can’t will myself to readjust it because I don’t want to move her even an inch from my lap. She’s wearing a gray tank top with no bra and a small tight pair of pink cotton panties. I glimpse down between her legs spread with her thighs on either side of me, her knees pressed into the cushion, and my head begins to spin with need.
“Fredrik…please.” She softens her gaze to the point of frowning and I fight not to be putty in her fucking hands. “The way you were with me all the times before—you were different. Sometimes rough, other times you looked at me before you took me as if you were fighting something inside. Something predatory, primal.” She moves her little hips on my lap with purpose. I can’t breathe. “You were always holding something back with me. And now…,” she leans inward and slides her tongue between my lips once. I can’t see through my tingling eyelids. “…now you treat me with such frailty.”
“Would you prefer that I didn’t?” I ask with a purpose of my own—I want to make her feel guilty so she’ll drop this. “What, you don’t like it?”
She pulls away from my lips and tilts her head dejectedly to one side. “No, no, I do.” She rests her hands on my shirt-covered chest. “Sometimes I feel like I could come just when you touch me. I never want you to change. I need you to be the way you are. The way you make me feel…I’ve never felt it before.”
“Then what does it matter how I was with Seraphina?” I tilt my head in the same manner, looking up at her. “Why do you care?”
“Curiosity, I guess.” She shrugs and somehow even that is sexy to me. “Maybe I want you to—”
A streak of jealousy shoots through me all of a sudden and she notices the change right away.
“Cassia,” I say trailing my fingertips down the softness of her bare arms, “You say you’ve never felt it before, the way you feel with me—have you been with other men?”
Her face falls and she looks downward at her hands now resting between her panties and my stomach. She doesn’t look ashamed. She appears as blank as she did when I asked her a few nights ago where she got the scars on her back and she couldn’t recall.
Her eyes meet mine with reluctance.
“Not that I can remember,” she says. “Never when I lived in New York. But before that—I don’t know.”
“Can you remember anything before New York?”
She shakes her head and now looks ashamed.
“Come here,” I say, cupping the back of her head and pulling her toward my shoulder where she rests the side of her face. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Fredrik?”
“Yeah?”
“If I had been with other men, would you still keep me here with you?”
My hand stiffens in her hair and I press her tightly against me, wrapping the other hand around her back.
I don’t know.
“Yes,” I tell her. “It wouldn’t matter to me,” I lie.
With any other woman other than Seraphina, it wouldn’t matter to me who or how many men she has been with. But Seraphina was different. She wasn’t a virgin when we met, but I knew by her refusal to talk about her first time, that it was someone she needed to forget. Seraphina called me her ‘true first’. She despised men. I was the only man she could ever love. The only man she would ever let touch her. Seraphina killed men for touching her—if I didn’t get to them first. But I was the only one. Until Marcus at Safe House Sixteen. And I killed him ten days after I found out.
Cassia raises her body from mine and looks into my eyes smiling soft and coyly. And again with purpose, she presses herself against my hardness below and I lose my breath. A low, guttural growl rumbles quietly through my chest.
“Cassia,” I say, ready to hoist her off of me, tucking my hands underneath her thighs, “we shouldn’t do this right now.”
What has gotten into her? Not that it bothers me—quite the opposite—but I get the feeling she’s jealous of Seraphina and is trying to take her place in all ways, not just in my heart.
She frowns.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“I’m sorry, I just—”
Reaching around her with one arm firmly around her waist so she doesn’t fall, I grab the iPad from the coffee table and toss it on the floor. Seconds after, I swipe away the files I had been reading about Kelly Bennings and Paul Fortright in Seattle. Photographs and sheets of white paper scatter about the accent rug. I lean over forward and Cassia instinctively grabs me around the neck to keep from falling backward, and I fit my hands about the upper legs of the coffee table, pulling it closer.
I lay her down on it on her back.
“What are you doing?” she asks with curiosity but no insecurity —she has an idea of what I’m doing.
“Whatever I want,” I say, fitting my fingers behind the elastic of her panties and pulling them off.
Grabbing her ankles, I prop her feet on the edge of the table.
Her eyes grow wider.
My dick gets harder.
Her thighs fall apart before me, spreading like butterfly wings. I help her hold them still, grasping them with both hands, until she holds them still on her own.
“If you swear to me you’ll never ask about Seraphina again”—I slide my middle finger between her nether lips, up and down twice before spreading her apart. She gasps.—“I’ll do this for you. Anywhere you want me to do it. Whenever you want me to do it. And often when you least expect it.”