Page 23 of The Hitman's Prince

“It’s better than the alternative,” he said, bracing himself against the sink.

“What’s your name?” I asked, notching myself behind him in the cramped space. I curled my hands around his waist, appreciating the heat of his skin over the waistband of his pants. We were so close and the blood and sweat from the wounds on his back had already stamped themselves across the front of my white button-up so I didn’t bother trying to make room.

“Jake,” he whispered. “Jacob.”

“Father Jacob,” I repeated.

He shook his head. “Just Jacob.”

“Alright.” I tapped my fingers against his waist. “Is it okay if I help you getcleaned up?”

“Do either of us have a choice?” He caught my reflection in the small mirror in front of us, eyes turned down at the corner and his entire expression absolutely forlorn.

I looked at the blood dripping down his back, the bruises and the cuts, the already healed-over scars, recounting every time I’d ever found myself in his shoes, every choice I’d ever made.

“We always have a choice.”

“Not when it comes to him.”

I found it hard to believe that this absolute stranger, this man of God as he were, was also so irrevocably in love with Vince Angelini there was no other way out of this life besides at his heel.

I didn’t want to see Jacob as competition, but it was hard to not. When I stood at his back, jealous of the marks Vince had forced me to give him, when the only thing I wanted was Vince’s fingers around my throat. Let him wring the life out of me with his bare hands.

I deserved that.

Not this.

I shoved Jacob’s pants down to his ankles, then reached over to turn on the shower. The water ran ice cold, then quickly hot, and I leaned against the back wall while he stepped under the spray.

“Are you meant to wash my feet next?” he asked, tilting his head back and using both hands to work overtop his head to wet his hair.

“I’m not anyone’s savior.”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and he did the work of cleaning all the parts of him besides his back. Neither of us spoke as he rinsed the suds down the drain, and he didn’t have to ask for me to hold the towel open for him. He stepped into it—into me—and I gingerly settled the scratchy terrycloth on his shoulders. I dried his arms, his chest, his stomach, the fronts of his thighs. His cockwasas long as I’d imagined it to be when he had his orgasm, and I left it wet and unattended because I was jealous of him.

“Go sit on the foot of the bed,” I told him, taking the towel and hanging it on the far-too-small bar on the back of the door.

I turned my attention to the cabinet under the sink, finding a first aid kit well-enough stocked that I was confident Jacob had a habit of getting himself into situations where he needed to be bandaged up. I took the kit and joined him on the bed, straddling him from behind so I didn’t drag my shoes all over his sheets.

“Bend,” I said, pressing against the back of his neck.

He folded forward with a groan. I wet a gauze with alcohol and began the tedious task of cleaning his wounds the way I should have been there to clean Vince’s after he was shot in the chest. He’d been lucky to survive. I’d been lucky he survived, though now he knew I was the one to order the hit on him, that luck was perilously close to running out.

“You should have stitches in at least one of these,” I said.

“Just one?” He made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “You should have hit me harder.”

I pressed my thumb into the wound in question until Jacob gasped and straightened, leaning back into me with a breathy and slutty moan.

“Why on earth would I do that?” I whispered, sinking my teeth into his ear. “Why would I give you the things I want the most?”

“Because he told you to.” Another groan. “Because he wants me too.”

I snatched a butterfly bandage out of the kit and applied it to the cut I’d just worsened, not bothering to clean up him a second time when the blood raced down the muscular lines of his back, pooling at the dips above his ass.

I didn’t turn away.

Chapter 18