Page 136 of The Cruelest Chaos

“Why’d you get this?” I ask him, rubbing my finger up and down the tattoo.

He cocks a brow. “To scare girls like you away.”

“Like me?” I didn’t expect that answer. My hand comes down to his neck, then over his shoulders as I massage him with both hands.

His eyes nearly roll back in his head. “Goddamn, that feels good.”

I dig my nails in instead and his eyes spring open, shocked. “You didn’t answer my question, Mavy.”

He rolls his eyes, but pulls me in closer, laying my head against his shoulder as he plays with my hair. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Girls like you. Beautiful. Smart.Good.”

I shake my head against his shoulder, my cheek moving against the fabric of his shirt. “I’m not good, Mavy,” I mumble against him.

He keeps stroking my hair. “You are, baby. You’re perfect. For me, you’re perfect.”

My heart aches with those words. “Then why would you want to scare me away?”

He cradles my head to his chest, one arm wrapped around my waist, holding me to him. “So I wouldn’t hurt you.”

I squeeze my eyes closed. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“Didn’t I? I’m about to take you from your mom—”

“Fuck her.”

“—andCon,” he says with obvious disgust, “and The goddamn Ark, and every other boy who ever laid eyes on you and wanted to make you theirs.”

“What about girls?”

He stiffens. “Them, too.”

That surprises me. “You wouldn’t want a threesome?” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I think about Lucifer and what almost happened between us and my body tenses.

Maverick is being gentle with me right now, but he isn’t always. And I don’t want him to be. He’s better, though, and so am I, and I guess that’s all anyone can really ask for from one day to the next.Better.

But his arms only tighten around me. “No,” he answers me. “No more. I own you, remember?”

I laugh against him, glad the moment has passed. It’s too nice outside, too beautiful for us to be angry. “I own you too, asshole.”

“You mean you don’t want me tracking down other girls in the woods and slapping the shit out of them?”

I push away from him and grab his face, squeezing his lips together. He still smirks at me, his beautiful eyes gleaming. “I’ll kill you, Mavy.” I lean down close, my lips over his, my voice soft. “I’ll kill you. And if you do what Sid did to Lucifer,” my eyes flick to the door at his back and his expression changes to something darker, “I won’t sit around and cry. I’ll fucking find you and kill you, and whoever you try and run off with.”

He laughs. “Such big threats for such a little girl, baby. I don’t think you’d have it in you to kill me.”

I roll my eyes and kiss him. He opens his mouth for me, his tongue claiming mine as he holds me close. When we finally pull away, breathless, he says, “Let’s go before I wanna fuck you and we wake the whole house up.”

* * *

Mom isn’t therewhen I leave, one single backpack packed up and thrown into the backseat of Maverick’s Audi,Come Thruplaying through his speakers.

He’d asked if I wanted to wait for her, but I didn’t.

Instead, I left her a note on the rickety kitchen table that just said:I hope you find some peace,held down with a rock that hadn’t been too hard to find behind the trailer. I’d wished I could have found a bone, too, but there weren’t any.

Maverick had asked me about it when I went scouting around back there. Asked me about the bone from the first night we met.

“It’s one thing we did together that wasn’t hell,” I’d told him. Going on nature walks, finding rocks and bones and marveling over it all.