Page 176 of Only for Him

She doesn’t need to know I’ve started fantasizing about her in new ways. Ways that, for me, are even more perverted than the ones that started this whole brutal affair.

I imagine Giselle becoming something else: not my partner, not my ally, not even my live-in cocksleeve.

My wife.

Mother to my children.

I want to keep her so close to me that she forgets how to breathe if I’m not there to remind her. I want her barefoot and bleeding in my kitchen, smiling while she stirs soup with bruises I put on her thighs. I want her in a rocking chair, hair gone silver, still snarling at the world but soft in my hands.

I want all of her, forever.

“You were right,” she says, snapping me out of my disgusting white-picket-fence fantasy.

“About what?” I ask, pleased despite myself. Giselle isn’t the type of woman to admit defeat to anyone, but I’m not just anyone.

“Sometimes justice isn’t enough,” she says. “Sometimes you have to burn the rot out.”

“I know,” I say. The words come out calm, but inside me, satisfaction blooms like fire.

About fucking time.

And it only took blood and betrayal and the death of everything soft inside us to get here.

But if she were easy to sway, she wouldn’t beher.

But if she were easy to sway, I never would’ve touched her.

Instead, I’d let her lie to me every goddamn day if it meant waking up next to that mouth.

“But you were wrong about the rest of it,” she says, chin jutting forward as she folds her arms over her chest.There she is.“You can’t keep doing this alone. You can’t just kill your way out of everything.”

I want to argue that killing is the only thing that ever solved anything, for men like me and the ones I hunt. And, whether she likes it or not, forher.

But I nod. Because if she’s willing to bend for me, I’ll break for her.

She just needs to ask at this point. The whole world is hers and I want to give it to her on fire. But if she wants it all rainbows and jury trials she can have it that way.

“I know,” I say. “Why else would I let you bring in the suits? I just don’t trust anyone else to do it right.”

“You mean you don’t trust me,” she scoffs.

“No.” I hold her eyes. “I mean I don’t trust anyoneelse.”

She looks away again, jaw working. I watch the tendons in her neck. I want to touch her, but I settle for the desk, tracing a pattern in the wood.

A knock at the door breaks the spell. Giselle gives me one last look, begging me to behave, before opening it.

“This is all extremely fucked-up,” Teddy says, sauntering in with a file folder and laptop under one arm. He drops the folder on the desk, scattering a few pages. “I’m honored to be a part of it.”

I could fucking kill him. Giselle knows it. She stiffens beside me, warning Teddy with her eyes. He doesn’t get it, because he glances between us, amused.

“I hope I get an invitation to the wedding, too.”

“Sit down, Oborin,” she says. “We need your brain. Not your mouth.”

He takes the seat at the end of the desk. “That’s a first.”

He’s a dead man. Once he’s given me what I need, he’s joining that fucker I just killed in her apartment.