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“Wouldyou?” she asks point blank.

It’s the first time she’s left me speechless, so I study her hands as she cuts into her dinner.

They’re steady and sure, the tremor from the night before missing.

That’s a good thing, yet the baser part of me misses the version of her who needed me. The version of her that wrapped her arms around my neck and let me hold her all night.

Tonight, I’m not fixated on the gaps in her memory. Tonight, I want to hear her speak after being gifted with so much of her silence.

Even if the sound of her voice comes at the expense of my ego. Because there are worse things than Delilah Rose calling me boring and mean.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why did you shoot my brother if you wanted him to pay you back?” She sizes me up with that curious gleam in her eyes I’m starting to adore. “Wouldn’t he be able to pay you easier if he wasn’t laid up in a hospital getting better?”

She doesn’t even know he’s not in the hospital anymore. And she looks like she couldn’t care less about it.

“Maybe.”

“So, why’d you do it?”

A lot of things would make perfect sense if I never laid eyes on her. Or never saw what her bitch ass brother was about to do to her.

I don’t have an answer because nothing I did that night was premeditated. But how do I explain to a woman I’d only met once that seeing anyone raise a hand to harm her had activated my trigger finger?

“The same reason I took you. Because I wanted to.”

Her hand freezes and the chandelier highlights the fluttering pulse dancing in her neck as she stares at me.

It’s the first time she’s stopped talking since she came down here and a sense of triumph rushes me at the bewildered look in her eyes.

“Any more questions, Ms. Delilah?”

“Fuck you, Adonis.”

There it is.

Pride swarms my veins at the disgust clinging to those three words.

To be hated by this woman. My satisfaction is sick. Misplaced. All-consuming.

And I almost smile into my glass of tequila before letting the clear liquor coat my tongue. I can’t explain the thrill I get from her contempt, but it’s the most addicting thing I’ve ever experienced.

Love is a strong word. One I use sparingly, but I love the way Delilah hates me.

Tonight,like most nights, I find myself in my office. This time instead of tying up loose ends at work, I click on the folder full of footage I didn’t get to yesterday.

Alonzo categorized the footage from the Rose home in folders corresponding to the last twelve months Delilah was in the house. For every month, there are four more folders inside, breaking the videos down into weeks and then seven more folders inside those for each day of the week.

It’s meticulous and nothing less than the perfection I expect from Alonzo Kendrick.

Alonzo is my favorite shadow. Invisible until I need something and only around long enough to deliver.

He’s killed men based on a single look from me.

Got me into rooms I didn’t know existed.