Page 89 of Darling Psycho

Her brow puckered, and Lawless was ready to tell her the last of his secrets, put them on the floor like heavy waste. “What other reason was there?”

“You.”

TWENTY-ONE

“An enforcer’s way of pissing a circle around her.” - Lawless

“Me? You left because of me? What do you mean?” Her stutter shouldn’t be gorgeous. But it was.

Maybe that’s his sickness. Who knows?

“Do you think I couldn’t have killed the guy without getting myself locked up for years? There’s always another way. We have old members doing life. They could have gotten to him.”

“But... but you said there wasn’t. Snake said this was the only way to get at him.”

Lawless held her firm around the neck, keeping them connected by the skin.

“You know better than most the lies we tell ourselves.”

“You don’t lie.”

“Only to myself, apparently. It’s a new revelation I’m getting used to.”

She snorted a little and shyly pressed her hands to his expanding chest. Her touch burned and made him hungry. All her softness appeared to bleed directly into his skin, weakening him. And no matter how roughly he treated her delicate body, she always felt like the smoothest silk under his hands.

“Then why did you go to prison?”

The big question. The one that chewed through his gray matter, clean down to the bones and gristle. Ah, yeah. That fucking biggie.

He could tell her now, he supposed.

Rip out what was left of his guts.

“Ask yourself, angel, what would I have done when you brought college boyfriends around? When you took one or more of them to your bed? When he looked at you like an adoring puppy?”

The realization shone through her dark eyes, and her teeth found her bottom lip. Shaking her head, a little in denial of the truth she was learning.

Yeah, he was a fucking sicko.

Because she’d turned seventeen when he wanted her.

Couldn’t have her yet.

“I don’t believe you deliberately got yourself sent to prison over a few college boys.”

“I would have ripped their guts out and buried them in the mountains.”

As controlled as he was most of the time, as analytical, Lawless would have fucked her, ruined her for anyone else. She’d been so reliant on him, and he’d allowed it. He’d wanted it, unknowingly. The moment he admitted their relationship had changed in his mind, he’d had to pump the brakes, or his sick need would have wrecked her. Crushed her wings and then put them back together again so she’d become dependent on him wholly. Lawless craved her needing him.

That shadowy, possessive, and perilous feeling crawled through his chest, open now.

He was too hard, too severe to change for anyone.

Not a woman or man.

Not his angel.

It’s fuckingunreasonableof him to ask her to accept the deviant he is.