Page 27 of Finding Denver

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “This was my deal. I told you from the beginning I didn’t want to rely on you, that I wanted this to be a DeLuca venture?—”

“You’re not a fucking DeLuca!” he shouts. “You’re aLuxe. No, more than that, you’re mywife. And that comes with certain expectations.”

“Oh, it does?” I ask sweetly. “Enlighten me.”

“Obedience. Didn’t you say that on our wedding day, my love?”

My breathing is quick. “Not like this. You said I was yours. You said you didn’t want me in your shadow.”

“Oh, believe me, you are mine, but I’m rethinking everything else.”

I expect tears. I expect hurt. I expect the new kind of love we’d grown over the last year to shatter before me and the shards to tear me apart.

But the resolve I expect to dent only strengthens.

“You’re jealous.”

The quiet that follows those two words reinvigorates something in me. A coldness, a strength I haven’t felt since I held the gun to Wyatt’s head.

“I don’t envy those who follow me,” he says coolly, and I curl my fingers into my hands.

“I think this trip has come at a perfect time, hasn’t it?” I ask.

“And what the fuck do you mean by that?”

“Space,” I say. “I need some space from you.”

I can feel his anger simmering down the line, but I won’t regret the threat I’m making. Even if he’s not really losing me, I need him to think he is.

“If you don’t return when I want you to, Denver, I will fly out there and drag you the fuck back. We’re not reliving your little vacation after you killed Wyatt.”

“No, we’re not, because now I’m in control.”

Now, he laughs. “I’ll see you in three days.”

“I don’t need your permission to take a break from you.”

“Good, because you’re not getting it. Get your ass on a flight in three days, or I will come out there and get you. You need to start remembering who you are.”

“And who am I?” I ask quietly. “Ranger Luxe’s wife?”

“You’re finally getting it. Good girl.”

“You don’t get to make me who I am and then decide I’m too much,” I say. “I am not a toy for you to alter and twist to your pleasure.”

Ranger’s laugh is low and cruel. “And that is where you’re wrong. I’ve been shaping you since the day you walked through my doors, and if I decide I don’t like what you’ve become, it is myrightto change you.” The words hit like bullets, tearing through my flesh and everything that keeps me alive. This is what we’ve become.

Or is it what we’ve always been?

Ranger clears his throat. “Now, listen?—”

“No, you listen,” I interject. “I’ll be fucking damned if I’ll bow to the man who said he’d give me the world until herealized I’d expand it more than he ever could. I’ll be damned if I’ll close myself off, make myself smaller, quieten my voice for someone who said he wanted me to grow. So you listen to me, Ranger Luxe, and listen fucking good. You either make room for me, or you lose me. Those are your choices.”

Ranger once told me happiness was fragments. Power was whole. And just as that power tasted sweet, just as I was letting it spill over and through me, he snatched it away like a child deciding he didn’t want to share.

“You have no idea the things I’ll do to bring you back, Denver,” Ranger says, his voice so low that I grip the car door as shivers wrack me. “I was patient before because I had no choice. You’re my wife now. You belong to me. You do not get to leave unless Iletyou leave.”

I’m not that girl anymore. Not that woman who thought she could only exist with Ranger Luxe’s words in her ear. I deserve more than fucking fragments.