She made a vow; I did the same. She kept her vow until the day she was killed; I’d just broken mine.
Self-loathing. Self-condemnation. Self-destruction.
Guilt. Rage. Bitterness.
Never again.
I wouldn’t repeat the same mistake again, regardless of how beautiful Liana looked.
This time around, it’d finish me off.
With one shake of my head, I stood up. Her body slid off me and she fell on her ass with betrayal in her eyes as I strode away from her. But the taste of her, the scent of her, stained my skin.
I almost fucked her—not that what I’d done was innocent. It all went so fucking wrong. It took all my self-control not to grab her by that slim waist and slam her down, thrust inside her, and piston her until I emptied myself.
The moment I was back in my bedroom, I realized I was still butt naked. Fuck! Pulling on a pair of pajama pants, I lay in bed awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering how I could have stooped so low. I pondered what the fuck could have happened for Liana to have changed so drastically.
The girl I knew didn’t know how to slice someone’s throat or shoot to kill. She didn’t have her hands drenched in blood. Maybe my mind no longer remembered her. Them. Maybe somewhere along the way, my mind had broken.
Fuck, maybe I missed Lou so much that my mind conjured a small part of her in Liana desperate for just a moment when she was still with me.
My eyes snapped open to find the barrel of a gun pointed at me. The woman I dreamt about had her finger on the trigger and a pissed-off expression on her face. No—not the woman in my dream.
Chapter 23Liana
Kingston Ashford was an asshole.
I should have sliced his throat while he slept, cut off his dick and put it in the blender, then forgot all about him. Instead, here I was, giving him a chance to fucking explain. His unaffected reaction to my gun in his face was enough to set me off all over again. Maybe I needed to try harder.
My lips curled into a smile.
“Name’s Liana, dickwad,” I said, compartmentalizing this pain in my chest. I gazed down at him, at his long limbs hanging out from his mussed sheets, and had to clear my brain of his intoxicating scent. “How did you know Louisa?”
I waited for an answer while debating how I’d end this man’s life. Slow and painful, or quick and clean.