Page 9 of Wicked Refusal

“Over you,” Nikita clarifies. As if I needed the reminder.

“I don’t care if it was over Ted fucking Bundy. She never should have gotten back with him.”

Nikita’s eyebrows rise. It’s half skepticism, half pity, and right now, I’m not sure which one pisses me off more. “Ted Bundy? Been up late watching Netflix documentaries again, Yul?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you want me to know you mean.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“How about this?” She crosses her arms. Her leather jacket still hangs loose, ill-fitting, a reminder of all the mass she lost last summer, when she was held captive for three months and fed through a tube. She never got it back—not her muscle, not her strength. Doesn’t stop her from being a pain in the ass, though. “You miss her. You care about her. After all that’s happened, you still want her back.”

“I want nothing to do with her.”

“Then what the hell are we doing here?”

My jaw sets. There’s a lot I can’t stand about my lieutenant, but the thing I hate most is how blunt she can be when she thinks she’s right. When she thinks she knows something I don’t.

But I do know. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Abouther.

It’s why I pretended to make nice with Baldwin in the first place. I punched a hole in his cheap-ass drywall instead of in his fucking skull for one reason: I needed to get close, to see the truth for myself.

“She betrayed me,” I grit out. “She lied to me. She picked a goddamn wife-beater over—” I take a deep, sharp breath, refusing to finish that thought. “She threw it all away.”

“Right,” Nikita says. “So the question stands: Why are we here, again?”

“Because it doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“How so?”

Nikita’s motives are transparent. Her methods, even more so. She’s trying to get me to talk, to spit out the tangled mass at the center of my chest so she can pick it apart, thread by bloody thread.

Any other day, I’d tell her to shove her questions where the sun don’t shine and keep them there.

But this isn’t any other day. “Any other day” didn’t feature the sight of purple marks on Mia’s skin.

“She told me she got pregnant by Brad,” I say. “That she was sleeping with him all the time she was—” The wordswith mealmost escape my lips, but I drag them back with violence. “—workingfor me. But that couldn’t have happened.”

“Why not?”

Because I had eyes on her night and day.

Because I never would have let that piece of shit get close to her.

Because she said she?—

“She needs to explain herself to me,” I growl. “She owes me that. She owes me the truth.”

“The truth can be complicated,” Nikita sighs. “You of all people should know that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I literally held the girl at knifepoint and shegot me help.She didn’t turn me in, didn’t run off screaming—shehelped.I was a complete stranger, and she still did that. That’s the kind of person she is. Always thinking of others before herself.” She puffs a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “Call me crazy, but I just don’t see her cheating. It’s a selfish thing to do, and she’s not that.”

The image of her pregnant belly beats behind my eyes, persistent and infuriating. It wasn’t obvious, not in any way whatsoever, but it was pretty damn obvious tome.

My hands have roamed over that body more times than I can count. Her perfect curves fucking haunt me. Every dip, every valley—it’s all mapped out in my head.