Page 73 of Can't Stop Watching

Gianna's face flashes across my mind. Her name was Gee. Gianna Moretti. I see her sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, clutching that stuffed rabbit.

"Are monsters real?"she'd asked me.

Twelve-year-old me had lied through my teeth. "No, Gee. They aren't."

Two days later they found her body. The rabbit was gone. Her innocence too.

Maybe I should tell Lila everything. About Gianna. About how my father had men bring a terrified child into our home, how I tried to help her escape, how I failed. How that failure carved something cold and watchful inside me that's never left.

But I can't. Not yet. Some truths are too fucking heavy to hand to someone who's just starting to trust you.

"My father was a lawyer for the Carvetti family," I say instead, watching her face for the inevitable wave of disgust. "He didn't get his hands dirty directly. Just made sure the people who did stayed out of prison."

Lila's fingers still against my chest. "The mob? Like, actual organized crime?"

"The real deal. Not the Sopranos bullshit." I exhale slowly. "He'd bring work home. Have meetings in our living room with men who'd killed people. I'd serve them coffee, like we were playing fucking house."

"Jesus, Dane."

"Yeah." I give her a humorless smile. "By sixteen, I knew how to launder money through shell corporations. College application skills, right there."

Her eyes soften with something that looks dangerously like compassion. "Is that why you joined the Marines? To get away?"

"Partly." I don't tell her the rest—that I joined to learn how to kill efficiently, that some primitive part of me believed if I'd known then what I know now, maybe Gianna would still be alive. "I wanted to be nothing like him."

"You're not," she says with that same certainty. Where the fuck is it coming from?

The irony twists my gut. If she knew about the surveillance equipment in her apartment, how I've watched her, invaded her privacy... she'd see exactly how much of my father lives in me.

"You can't know that," I tell her, my voice harder than intended.

"I see how you look at me," she counters. "I doubt someone like your father would look at anyone the way you look at me."

She's not wrong about that. My father was a glacier—cold, impassive, grinding everything in his path to dust. Even with my mother. Even with my sister, Juliet. I don't think I ever saw him touch either of them with anything resembling tenderness. His idea of affection was the absence of cruelty, and even that was rare.

"What are you thinking about?" Lila murmurs, her fingers tracing the hard lines of my forearm.

I shake my head slightly. "The past. Ghosts." I kiss the top of her head, breathing in the scent of shampoo in her hair. "I'll tell you about my sister. Next time. For now, I just want to watch you sleep."

She raises an eyebrow. "That's not creepy at all."

I chuckle despite myself. "I mean I want you to get some rest. And I want to make sure you're safe." My arm tightens around her. "Here. With me."

Safe. What a fucking joke. I've watched her sleep already, through a camera lens. I'm the last person who should be promising safety.

Yet I meant what I said. I want her safe. I need her to be.

"You think I'm not safe otherwise?" she asks, a small furrow appearing between her brows.

The world isn't safe for anyone, sweetheart. Especially not for women who ask too many questions.

"Force of habit," I say instead. "Marines sleep in shifts. Someone's always on watch."

Her expression softens. She curls into me, her head finding the hollow of my shoulder like it was made to rest there. "So you're on first watch, then?"

"Something like that."

The truth is, I don't want to sleep. Sleep means dreams, and my dreams have teeth. Better to stay awake, count her breaths, memorize the weight of her against me.