Page 124 of Devious Knight

“Come on, Lolita. Be bad with me.” I taunt, crooking my finger to beckon her to follow me. Like the curious lamb she is, she obeys.

“How do you know what the Bratva compound looks like?” she asks after a few beats of silence. “I always thought you might have gone to prison, or something like that.”

“I did.”

Although she looks at me, I keep my head straight.

“Really?”

“Juvie.”

“What did you do?”

“Set fire to the school gym and burned it to the ground, then I beat a teacher to a bloody pulp.” I look back at her. She looks shocked.

“What happened?”

“Shit.” Shit I don’t want to think about now because it’s all to do with my parents. And I don’t want to think about her in relation to what happened to them. “The teacher said some stuff I didn’t like about my parents. It was just after I lost them.” I’ll give her that much.

“I’m sorry.”

Her soft voice and expression of sorrow sink into me more than it did the other night when she said she was sorry to hear about my grandfather. Although she doesn’t know what happened to my parents, hearing her say sorry feels like she’s sorry for that, too. I know she would be if she knew.

“Thanks.”

“People said stuff about my mom all the time, too. And I guess it’s no secret that we’re considered outcasts among Knight families.”

“That’s bullshit.” I say that, but I know what she means, and she’s right.

It is bullshit, though. Senior Knights or male heirs of elite families can marry whoever they want, but women can’t. They’re bound to marry whomever their fathers choose for them. I’ll be damned if I ever treat my kid like that.

“At one point, I thought that’s what you thought of me.”

I look at her again and realize why she thinks that. It’s because of that party. The first one where I told her she was beneath me.

I shouldn’t have said that. I go crazy with anything to do with my parents, and I’d just found out she’d implanted the code at the gallery. Although I didn’t have all the details at that point, I was so mad at her and mad that she could be the missing link. I was mad because I didn’t want her to be.

I wanted to be wrong, even at the expense of another failed attempt.

“No. I never did.”

She gazes up at me, and I see the question in her eyes—what did I do to you?

I’ve tortured her the way I wanted to. The problem now is when she finds out, this ends. I know it would. Before, it almost didn’t matter, but now that I want her, it does.

“Anything else I should know before I continue down this dark path with you?” She switches the mood back with the lightness in her tone.

I release her hands and walk backwards so I can face her. “You won’t be able to walk in the morning when I’m done with you.”

She blushes again. “That’s not a good thing.”

“You’ll think it’s good. Sometimes pain is pleasure. You’ll see what I mean the next time I fuck you raw.”

She swallows hard, and her pulse leaps against the skin of her elegant neck. “You’re like this all the time, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Get used to it, Lolita.”

“Used to it?”