Page 42 of Dirty Hit
I stand, gathering my bag, but only make it halfway down the bleachers before his voice catches me.
“You leaving without saying hi properly?”
I turn despite myself. He’s free of children now, though one little boy is still hanging off his arm like a barnacle. Dominic has an orange popsicle in one hand and a look on his face that says he knows exactly what kind of internal war I’m currently losing.
“I said hi,” I point out. “By being publicly humiliated.”
He walks over, barnacle child in tow, and stops close enough that I can see the grass stains on his knees. “Mason, go ask Jenna if she wants the last blue popsicle.”
Mason eyes me suspiciously, then nods and tears off.
The second he’s gone, Dominic lifts the orange popsicle and taps it against my wrist. “Truce offering.”
I stare at it. “You’re bribing me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Take the popsicle.”
I do, mostly because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. It’s melting already, sticky at the edges.
He watches me, expression unreadable now that the joke’s mostly gone.
“You came to watch me,” he says. Not teasing. Just… noting it.
I look away, annoyed by how much that matters to him. “I was curious.”
“About whether I eat children in my spare time?”
“That was one theory.”
He hums. “And the verdict?”
I peel the wrapper back a little more, buying time. “I think that you’re very inconvenient.”
A slow smile spreads across his mouth, the kind that makes my stomach drop and my temper spark at the same time. “Inconvenient,” he repeats.
“You’re impossible to categorize,” I say, more sharply now that he’s looking at me like that. “It would be a lot easier if you were just one thing.”
His gaze changes. Deepens. “Yeah?” he says quietly. “Would it?”
I grip the popsicle stick tighter. “Don’t do that thing where you act like you can hear what I’m not saying.”
He steps a fraction closer. “I usually can.”
The answer should make me back up. Instead, I stay where I am, because apparently I’m incapable of preserving my own peace around him.
For one stretched second, it feels like the whole field has gone quiet, even though kids are still yelling behind us and someone’s blowing another whistle. It’s just me and him and the orange popsicle sweating in my hand.
Then one of the staff women calls his name from across the grass, asking if he can help stack equipment in the shed.
The moment breaks, Dominic glancing over his shoulder, then back at me.
“See you later, Little Sin,” he says, and walks off.
I stand there in the late afternoon sun, with a melting popsicle in my hand, and watch him jog back toward the kids, back toward the shed, back toward the version of himself I wish I hadn’t seen because now I can’t unsee it.
I wanted proof that everyone else was stupid—that they were all falling for a performance—and that the sweet, generous, patient Dominic Volkov was just a public skin pulled over something rotten.
Instead, I got a far more dangerous truth: the rotten parts are real, but so are the good ones.
