Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
“Him? Needing saving?” Daisy snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Where are you?” I demanded, cutting off the conversation. She did not need to know the finer details of just how much Knox needed saving, nor was that the right time to try to win her over and put her on Team Knox. I figured that would take a while, if he stuck around.
A stab of panic hit my midsection at the thought of him being anywhere but there. With me.
“San Francisco,” Daisy answered, taking the change of subject in stride. “Well, Napa. We’ve got a little villa here.” I didn’t miss the warmth in her tone, the bashfulness.
“We?” I clarified. “As in you and Joey?” I’d known they were together, but the hitch in her voice told me that they were also together.
I got the job of seducing and killing the mafia don, and she honeymooned—for lack of a better word—in wine country with the mafia man who started all of this. Exactly how it should’ve been. This was the pinnacle of me protecting Daisy from the horrors of life, the full consequences of thoughtless actions. It wasn’t exactly healthy of me, but I didn’t give a shit. I’d preserve my sister’s hopeful naïveté for the rest of my life if I could.
“Yes, yes. I don’t want to hear it,” she whined, obviously expecting some kind of lecture about Joey. I wasn’t going to give one, since I didn’t really have a leg to stand on when it came to talking about choosing appropriate partners. It didn’t mean I liked Joey, though. “He did save our lives, after all.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. It didn’t serve me to point out that he was the one who put our lives in danger in the first place. Without Joey, never would’ve been pulled into this world. If my sister had never met Joey, I never would’ve met Knox. Unthinkable. Somehow, I owed my life as I knew it to one of my sister’s lovers.
Fate was a funny thing.
“You’re coming back to the city?” I asked, yearning to see my sister. Despite the complicated situation that would arise with her in Knox being in the same vicinity again. I would never be able to forget his hands on her neck.
“Eventually,” Daisy said, guilt soaking her tone. “As long as you’re safe,” she added quickly, obviously feeling strange about taking a vacation when she knew I’d been through some serious shit.
Sure, the thought of being able to see my sister again, to download all that I’d been through on someone familiar, was tempting. But I’d never tell her the full truth of it anyway. My sister was all sunshine, no clouds. I’d added a whole bunch of clouds to my persona in the past weeks. I didn’t want to change the way she saw me.
I looked at Knox, my eyes catching on the ridges of his face, the glorious profile he cut. “I’m safe,” I whispered. And I truly was. Knox was danger personified. Death personified. Everything I’d always protected myself from. Nevertheless, I felt safe.
“Good. We’ve got a lot to catch up on, huh?” Unsurprisingly, Daisy’s good nature persevered as she failed to catch all the layers to my response.
My eyes refused to look from Knox, worried about the shape of our future. “That we do.”
“But we made it,” Daisy’s voice filtered through the phone, triumph in it.
“We made it,” I agreed. Another victory for the Matthews women.
“Grandma would be proud.”
My eyes squeezed shut. Sometimes my sister could be obtuse, and other times, she could be perceptive to an uncanny degree.
“She really would,” I choked out, thinking of my hard yet soft grandmother. Complicated, strong, fierce and kind. A woman of multitudes.
We lingered in the silence of our grief and love for a handful of seconds before a squeal punctured the quiet.
“Joey,” Daisy laughed. “Don’t, I’m talking to—”
The call cut off, in true Daisy fashion. I smiled at the screen, shaking my head and feeling endlessly grateful that some things hadn’t changed.
I put the phone down between me and Knox.
His hand instantly threaded with mine.
I didn’t ask exactly where we were going. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter. Though I had a guess—and though I’d yearned to go home—trepidation filled me at the prospect of those walls, whether I’d ever fit between them again.
My hand fits in Knox’s.
I’d figure out the rest.
Knox was cooking in my kitchen.
In my apartment.
Within twenty-four hours of killing the head of a criminal organization. It was the early hours now. I hadn’t bothered to pick up my phone again. It had once been a lifeline to the world, one I’d been unhealthily glued to. Being without it for so long had made it lose its appeal. Why in the heck would I want to mindlessly scroll right then?
Knox had asked what I’d eaten, after he’d traipsed through my apartment like an anthropologist walking through the home of a foreign tribe.