Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
And her frustration made her prickly and snippy at times.
Most men would likely get sick of it really fast. The thing was, though, I was used to the prickly and snippy and borderline nasty sides of Cinna. What I hadn’t really ever gotten to see before, though, were the sides of her I was seeing in between her bursts of anger.
The softer, the sweeter.
The parts of her that I’d been insisting for years to her and anyone else around I knew existed. Getting nothing but eye rolls and head shakes from them.
The thing was, I understood her in ways she couldn’t even wrap her head around yet.
While she’d never told me her story, I knew how a rough childhood made you really fucking good at playing at personas, at putting on masks to hide what was truly underneath.
For me, it was the jovial and easy-going. A light people—especially women—leaned into.
But I knew what was hiding beneath. A darkness that ran deep, a penchant for violence and pain I had little control over when it showed up.
That was how I knew that this face Cinna wore for the world—cold and hard and compulsively independent—hid the exact opposite underneath. Warm and soft and desperate to be taken care of.
Maybe it was that true darkness inside of me that sought out the light in her. The hard longing for soft. My strength begging for someone to look after, to unburden.
“What?” Cinna snapped, making me realize I’d been staring at her again.
“Your eye looks a little better,” I declared for something to say. Because there was no way to tell a woman like Cinna—so closed off and repressed—that I had a feeling there was something, I don’t know, kismet between us.
“It’s almost worse that it’s partially open,” she admitted, tossing her phone onto the coffee table, giving up on texting for the moment. “It’s messing with my vision.”
“We could get you an eye patch.”
“So you can make endless pirate jokes?” she asked, smirking. “I don’t think so. Ugh,” she grumbled when her phone started to ring. “They’re like children,” she mumbled to herself, snatching up her phone and bringing it to her ear. “What now?” she said by way of greeting, making me shake my head.
I couldn’t imagine working for Cinna. Her men must piss their pants at the idea of coming to her and telling her that they’d fucked up something.
“Jesus Christ,” she sighed, tapping her fingers on her leg.
Cinna was a pacer when she was on the phone. She was always on the move, never sitting still. She must have been going half crazy that her ribs were keeping her ass on the couch right then.
“Yeah, fine. Go help him out. But let him get a little scared first,” she said. “He’s never gonna fucking learn if he doesn’t almost die a time or two,” she declared.
“Soldier acting up?” I asked when she hung up.
“I’m starting to regret being nice and letting him climb up from associate just because he’s the brother of one of my most dependable men.”
“We all had to get our young and stupid out,” I said. At her raised brow, mine scrunched. “So that wasn’t you that I saw walk into the restaurant run by the Yakuza and start yelling at the first fucking lieutenant that he better get his operation off of your turf before you cut off his balls, bronze them, and wear them as earrings?”
“I still get random deliveries of Chinese food I didn’t order,” she admitted. “It’s probably poisoned.”
“He probably wants to fuck you.”
“He’s eighty if he’s a day,” she said, wrinkling up her nose.
“They’ve got pills to keep things working. Come on, you don’t want to be a first lieutenant’s wife?”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s wife,” she said, and there was no logical explanation for the pang those words caused me.
“He’s married anyway,” I said, turning to make a pot of coffee. “So, you’d have to be his mistress.”
“Don’t you have to, you know, work?” Cinna asked as I brought her a cup of coffee. Black, like she claimed to like it, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that was something she’d taught herself to avoid having the men around her comment on a ‘girly’ drink.
“I’m not quite as dedicated as you are,” I told her. “Sorry this is not the toxic sludge you usually drink, but it will have to do.”
“My coffee is not that strong,” she insisted in an exasperated way that suggested more than a few people had complained about it.
“I could use it to fuel my car,” I shot back, getting a little laugh out of her. It was a rare sound. But, fuck, was it worth it when you did get to hear it.
“This isn’t bad,” she declared after taking a sip. “I needed it. The meds are making me want to crawl right back into bed.”