After all, I’d never seen that kind of love before.
On their best days, my parents had just avoided each other.
On their worst days, they’d plotted to kill each other.
No one knew where the breakdown had happened, but there’d been rumors. Some whispered tales about how before meeting my mother, my father had actually been in love with the Irish mafia lord’s daughter, Sinead McCleary. But how her father had denied their love, and forbade them from seeing each other.
Some of those rumors said that her father had killed her.
Others said that she died of a broken heart.
But either way, my father had been denied the only woman he had truly loved and wanted, and over time it had turned his heart to stone.
At first, he was kind and gentle to my mother, but it wasn’t long before he was cold and distant. And then after Pasha was born, looking so different with his blue eyes and blonde hair, my father had checked out entirely.
He used his “suspicions” about Pasha’s parentage as a way to justify having a mistress, even though my mother had rarely ever left our house.
And the way he treated Pasha was absolutely despicable.
…Especially when he had used him as a weapon against me.
Pasha and I had always been close, and my father hated it.
And so, every time I would fuck up, or fail or even disappoint him slightly in my training, he would use Pasha as a way to punish me.
One time, I was less than perfect on my target practice sheets, and my father, in his rage and delusion, had decided I needed to be punished. His punishment? Locking my claustrophobic brother in a crypt in Calvary Cemetery in the freezing cold…and telling me to find him…all on my own.
I’d scrambled around that cemetery for hours, screaming for my brother, certain that I was going to be the cause of his death. And if Cal hadn’t shown up to help me find him in secret, I might’ve.
Pasha had survived that day, and my father had taught me a valuable lesson: That love, in all its forms, was dangerous.
Perhaps that’s why I keep everyone at a distance, and why love has always been such a hard concept for me to wrap my head around.
And then, out of nowhere, she wandered into my life.
I’d loved her from the moment I saw her. Every curve of her body felt familiar, as if somehow, I had designed her, and manifested her out of thin air.
The only problem was, she belonged to someone else. And even as selfish as I was, after watching the horrific dissolution of my parents’ relationship, I could never wish that misery on anyone. But it felt as if the universe was playing a cruel trick on me, taunting me with the very thing I desired, while keeping her just out of reach.
In a way this only further hardened my already jaded heart, and confirmed what my father had tried to drill into me: I was meant to be alone.
Yet as I lay here in the darkness, feeling Abigail curl her body around mine, I realize that nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, my life is dangerous, and yes, being with me comes with risks that the average, sane, rational woman would never willingly sign up for.
But Abigail Wayne isn’t average.
Nor is she sane or even rational.
She’s a killer.
And yet, somehow, she’s been the only woman I’ve ever wanted. And the one I know was made specifically for me.
Somehow, I know that I would sacrifice my soul to the devil if it meant I got to have her.
I meant what I said to her that day in the greenhouse.
I do love her.
I want to marry her.
