Page 68 of Ruthless Creatures

“Exactly. Oh—there’s one more thing you should know before you decide.” He glances over at me. “It’s bad.”

I throw my hands in the air. “Worse than you being a mobster?”

“I can’t have children.”

I thought I was speechless before. I really did. But that little gem just knocked my ability to form words right out of the park.

He takes my stunned silence as an invitation to keep talking.

“I had a vasectomy when I was twenty-one. There’s no way I’dbring a child into this life.Mylife. It’s too dangerous. It would be unfair. So you should take that into consideration when you’re deciding whether or not you want to keep seeing me. I’ll never be able to give you children, if that’s something you want.”

I blink an unnecessary amount of times. I clear my throat. I take deep, cleansing breaths.

Which does fuck all to help.

“You know what? This is too much for my hard drive to process right now. I don’t want to discuss this anymore.”

I fold my arms over my chest, huff out a heavy breath, and close my eyes.

We drive for a while in silence, until Kage says in a low voice, “I’ll give you anything else you ask for. Everything you ask for. Anything you wanted for the rest of your life, you’d have.”

“Please stop talking now.”

“You’d be taken care of forever. You’d be my queen.”

I open my eyes and stare at him in disbelief. “A queen in hiding? A queen who couldn’t wear her crown because all her king’s enemies would see it and want to chop off her head?”

He clenches his jaw. Through gritted teeth, he says, “You’d be protected.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean sequestered?”

“I’m not going to lock you away, if that’s what you think.”

Emotion swells in my chest, rising in my throat to form a lump I have to swallow around.

“No. You wouldn’t lock me away. From the sound of it, you’d just pop in and out of my life like you have been, coming and going whenever you please, getting your rocks off and vanishing to who knows where until the next time you decide you’re horny, all under the guise of keeping me safe from the cops.”

He’s getting angry. I can see it in the way he’s clenching his jaw. In the way his breathing has changed. In the death grip he’s got on the steering wheel.

His voice gravelly, he says, “It’s not aguise. It’s the fucking truth.”

“Even if I believed you, Kage, why should I want this for myself? Why should I want any of this?”

He snaps, “I won’t try to argue you into it. Either you want me or you don’t.”

“Of course I want you! I want you like I’ve never wanted anything! But don’t you think I’ve already been through enough? You think I should put my heart on the line again when you’ve flat-out told me who and what you are and what the limits of this relationship would be?”

“No!” he roars. “I don’t! Which is exactly what I’m fucking saying!”

He careens around another corner. We narrowly miss killing a pedestrian in the crosswalk.

A few minutes later, we screech to a stop in my driveway. Before he can say another word, I’m out of the car, hustling toward the front door.

When I open it, he barges right through behind me. When he slams the door shut, Mojo lifts his head from where he’s lying in the middle of the living room floor, makes a halfheartedwoof,then goes back to sleep.

I swear, if I were ever robbed, that dog would usher the robbers right in and show them where my jewelry is.

“Don’t walk away from me.” Kage grabs my arm and spins me around to face him.