Page 29 of Loving the Tormentor

This man wears his name like a glove, carved exactly how I would expect a demigod to look like. I try not to count his abs, but there are obviously more than enough to ignore, and his Adonis belt points straight to where I should absolutely not look.

He dabs his neck with his shirt, and all I can do is stand there with my eyes stuck on the tattoos on his chest and shoulders.

"You've got tattoos," I say dumbly.

There are some small bats on his left shoulder, a sentence in French that runs down his arm.La vie n'est qu'un jeu.And right by his right shoulder, a pair of soft, female eyes are looking right at me. They seem young, childish even.

"Why the shock?" he asks.

"It's just not very…rich kid of you."

He runs a hand through his pitch-black hair. It falls beautifully to his neck, leaving a curtain on either side of his eyes.

"Never having tasted champagne is very North Shore kid of you."

"I'm so—" I need to scratch my throat. "I'm sorry."

"You're fine." He throws his t-shirt to the side, and all that he's left wearing are his jeans and that gold necklace.

He comes back to stand next to me, both of us leaning against his desk, and I automatically move to his left out of habit. Helooks at me with questioning eyes, but when he doesn't get an explanation, he simply brings a hand to my face, pushing my fringe out of my eyes.

"I like the bangs."

I swallow thickly, trying to keep composure.

"Uh, thanks. So…" Using my thumb, I point at the sheets behind us. "Have you been composing anything?"

"Let's not push it." He snorts. "Tell me about you, Nyx. When did you start playing?"

I lick my lips, tasting the remnants of the bitter drink. "In middle school."

He nods slowly. "Must have been tricky where you're from."

"It was," I agree. "But I had a great teacher. She taught me after school for free, had a lot of faith in me, and gifted me my first violin. Then my dad sold it to gamble, but that's another story."

He observes me with those eyes that seem to read into my past, like he can see an entire movie of my life in his head.

"Is she the one who told you about our school of music?"

I nod as a pang moves through my chest. "Yeah, but she died before I could get in."

"How?"

His question is obvious, a morbid curiosity everyone gets when they talk about the North Shore. "Gang stuff. Because we're such bad people on the other side of the river, blah blah blah."

"You'd be surprised to know how many dead bodies show up on this side of town too. You haven’t landed in some sort of utopia."

I can't help the sarcastic laugh that bursts out of me.

"Come on. I saw you two weeks ago. You were upset your daddy dragged you to an inauguration and put on a crooked tie as an act of rebellion. That's probably as crazy as it gets here."

"That’s quite an assumption to make. Been observing me closely, have you? So much so you feel confident about the kind of relationship I have with my dad?"

I pause, blinking at him like an idiot. How do I tell him that, yes, Ihavebeen observing him closely. For years. That I spend hours a day scrolling through accounts that add up every little detail they can find about his life until they have a picture of him we can all fangirl over. And yes, I did look at him intensely during the inauguration, enough to see that tie, the fact that his father and him didn’t exchange a word, and with the rest of the info I know about him–the divorce, the move to France–I came to that conclusion.

How do I tell himallthat without sounding like an absolute creep?

Surprisingly, after everything I’ve been told about him, he spares me the embarrassment and keeps talking.