“You’re the one who wants to ‘be.’ I told you it was a bad idea,” I spat as I picked up the glass of bourbon I’d forgotten about when we left. It burned on the way down, but I needed it for the conversation she started.

“Yes, but your actions back at the bar? Laying claim to me caveman-style? Being possessive and jealous?”

Fuck. She was right. My need to one-up Andrew, to get him to back the fuck up, let the beast divulge the greedy and selfish desires I kept from even myself.

“You changed things.”

Changed?

No!

Memories of all the photos of death and destruction the Marconi dealt over the years flew through my mind. If things continued, I would condemn her to be another photo in a file with his name on it.

I turned and grabbed hold of the glass, then swung my arm out with all the frustration in me, sending it shattering against the wall.

“Fuck!” I tugged at my hair. “Why was he there?”

“Who? Andrew?”

“Who the fuck else?” I asked, not caring if I sounded like a condescending ass. “He doesn’t know shit about me!”

“Well, he seems to think he knows something,” Lila said.

I began pacing, my gaze anywhere but her. The way Andrew talked about me, the venom he spewed meant he’d talked to people about me.

“With all the rumors, he probably believed them. He seems the type.”

Lila held up her hand. “Before I touch that last part…what rumors?”

I stopped and stared at her. Since the beginning, I told Jack that I needed anonymity, a clean slate. The problem was not everyone could keep their damn mouths shut. There was a posture to gossipers. The stare and whisper, looking around. They didn’t see me at first, but their demeanor would always change when they noticed me.

While I knew that most of the office didn’t know anything about me, some remembered my name from stories in the news. They recognized me.

“Lila, you’re intelligent, so I know you’ve figured out transactional law and contracts are not my area, but I can do it.”

She nodded. “You don’t have the personality, and no one graduates with honors from Harvard Law to work contracts at a law firm in Indianapolis, albeit a large one.”

“Exactly.”

I froze as realization dawned on me. We’d reached a point, a crossing. The next words would change things.

We already changed things.

As much as I hated to admit it, they had. I pulled at my hair in agitation, my jaw locked down. Andrew knew rumors, but I didn’t want Lila to know rumors.

“The last few years…hell, they’ve been hell…” I trailed off. How much could I tell her? My hand clenched my chest, and I fisted the fabric there. “I can’t go through that pain again. If I love you, then that’s something they can take away from me. Take revenge on me by hurting you. I can’t deal with that.” The strength left my voice, the next words barely a whisper. “Not again.”

The whispered thought of her being gone tore at me, and I closed the distance between us. My lips on hers, tongues tasting each other as I pulled her so close there was no space left between us.

Before things got us sidetracked, mainly my ever-growing constant need to be inside her, I slowed our kisses.

I reached up and caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers.

“I’m not worried about you being hurt by me, Lila. I’m worried about you being hurt because of me.”

There. An admission I hoped would appease her, because the energy flowing through me was going to explode soon, a fight in which I would drag out her darkness. Something to appease my own, appease the beast screaming inside me.

I returned to pacing, the agitation crawling up my throat, constricting me. She was a nervous mess, but I was a motherfucking hurricane.

A shudder rolled through me as I tried to reign in the emotions that were trying to explode. There was so much. So much I did wrong.

I was stuck, alive, standing in front of a woman who made me feel something, and I fucking hated it. I’d paid for my sins and I refused to pay again, but for some fucking reason, it felt like nothing had changed since the morning I woke up.

Nothing except the fragile woman in front of me that infuriated me. It was her fault I was voicing my pain. Because I met her and her irresistible call.

She fucking caused the flare in my chest, the anxiety that beat like a war drum in my veins.

My entire body was tense with anger and frustration, and I saw just how much so when Lila’s body leaned away from me.

“You think being a federal prosecutor is great. You work hard to put heinous criminals away, hopefully for good. You don’t think about the repercussions. About how the ones you’re prosecuting or their families may be angry with you and want revenge for you trying to uphold the law and make people safe. You don’t think about how someone will try to take your life because they blame you for ruining their life or their loved ones. They don’t care who else gets hurt in their quest to get to you. Sometimes they even threaten them to scare you.”

I moved to the couch and sat, my eyes fixed on the fireplace, agitation leaking from me in the form of my right leg bouncing at a frantic pace. The energy couldn’t be expelled fast enough and I picked up the only thing left on my side table, which was a sandstone coaster, and twirled it in my hand.

In my periphery, Lila moved closer but remained silent. She was so close to me, too close. They would come, and I would lose her.

A snarl ripped through me, and I pulled my arm back and threw the coaster against the fireplace where it shattered before falling to the floor and joining the pieces of glass.

“I was cocky. I thought nothing and no one could touch me. I was very wrong.”

So very fucking wrong, and I paid the ultimate price. My life was penance for that attitude.

Lila dropped to her knees in front of me.

Each word was fucking torture.

“I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t handle it, not after… I tried, I did. I failed miserably when not even a month back in, I exploded in the courtroom.”

“But you’re not a prosecutor anymore,” she said.

If only it were that simple. Vendettas rarely are, especially not with the head of a large criminal organization very pissed that you put his daughter in jail.

“Do you think that matters, Lila?” I asked. “This condo? It isn’t even under my name. Because I’m still alive.”