Page 29 of Dirty Hit
“Let go,” I say. “Get out of my apartment, Dominic.”
He sighs, as if I’m a child throwing a tantrum. “You really think you’re in a position to give me orders?”
“This is my place,” I snap, anger finally cutting through the fear. “You can’t just walk in here and get into my bed.”
“The door wasn’t that hard to pick,” he says, completely unfazed. “And you didn’t answer after the eighth time I called, so I figured something was wrong.”
“You picked my lock?” My voice jumps an octave. “Are you insane?”
“Yes,” he says dryly. “You knew that when you walked into my living room and saw a body on the floor.”
I want to scream. I want to shove him off the bed. I want to rewind time to before I knew he existed. Instead, I sit there in my rumpled T-shirt and boxers, my heart pounding so hard I feel it in my throat, my wrist trapped in his hand while he stares at me like I’m the one inconveniencing him.
I shake my head, trying to clear it. “You can’t just… break into people’s houses.”
He snorts. “Pretty sure we’re past the part where you pretend I follow rules, Little Sin.”
Hearing that nickname here, in my bedroom, cuts through the threads I was trying desperately to hold together. “Get out.”
“No,” he says, just as calmly.
“Dominic, I’m serious,” I say. “You can’t be here. I called in sick. I needed—”
“Space?” he offers when I trail off.
My jaw tightens. “Yes.”
He lets go of my wrist and rolls onto his back, staring at the ceiling.
“You know what’s interesting, Brendon?” he says. “When most people need space, they send a text. Or they answer one. Or they pick up the phone and say,‘Hey, I’m alive, leave me the fuck alone.’”
He turns his head to look at me again, and now I see the anger sitting there under the lazy tone. It’s not explosive, just a steady, irritated heat.
“I’ve been texting you all morning,” he says, “calling as well, and I got nothing. That’s rude.”
I blink at him, incredulous. “Rude? I skipped one day of responding to your constant harassment, and you broke into my apartment?”
His mouth quirks at the word harassment. “You really putting it like that?”
“What else am I supposed to call it?” I ask. “You cornered me twice, you put your hands on me, and then you show up here like you own the place because I didn’t answer your texts for a few hours.”
He yawns, completely at ease, like we’re having this conversation over coffee and not on my mattress. “You ignored me,” he says again. “That pisses me off.”
“I don’t owe you responses,” I shoot back. “I’m not your friend. I’m not your… anything.”
He smiles slowly, and it’s that cold, private version that has nothing to do with charm. “See, that’s where you’re wrong.”
I swallow, suddenly very aware of how close he is, how his body heat seeps through my thin shirt. “You have no claim over me,” I say, but the words sound weak even to my own ears.
His expression shifts, and the lazy, amused edge drops away. What’s left is focus.
Without warning, he pushes me down onto the mattress; it happens so fast my brain doesn’t have time to catch up. One second, I’m half sitting against the headboard, and the next my back is flat on the mattress. Dominic is over me, pinning both my wrists with one hand while the other slips around my throat.
A startled sound rips out of me on instinct before I just… stop. There’s a moment where my body could choose. Push, shove, kick, or scream.
I’ve been trained in self-defense; I know the angles. Dean’s office seminars and those campus safety pamphlets have drilled them into our heads: knee to the groin, thumb to the eyes, twist your wrist, and break the grip.
I don’t use any of it.
