Page 104 of Cruel Kiss

"It doesn't look like anything. Iranthe engine, Ronan." I point at the screen without touching it, like it's too hot to bear. "I fed everything Mercer gave me into the only tool on earth I trust more than my own eyes, and it came back at ninety-eightpercent. Damn near one hundred percent certainty that my current husband killed my previous one.”

The wordhusbandtwice in one sentence. It would be funny some other day.

He doesn't come toward me. He knows better. He stays on his side of the island, both hands planted on the marble now. "I didn't do it," he says.

"The number says?—"

"I don't give a fuck what the number says!" he roars. "I care what you— Cali, look at me. Not the screen.Me."

I want to look at him. I do. I want to more than anything.

But the last time I trusted my eyes over my data, I ended up married to a man who stole my company and told me it was for my own good.

The number is right there. Ninety-eight percent. My own machine. The one thing that never lies to me.

And Ronan is right there, too. Bloodshot. Devastated.

What to trust? What to choose?

I close my eyes.

Then I open them.

And I look athim.

I look at the man, not the dashboard. I look at the man who took the mirrors out of my house because he couldn't stand to watch me shrink. Who heard my son shout a fact through a doorway and rented an aquarium around it. Who got down on his kneeson my daughter's floor and said goodnight to a caterpillar. Who came when the killer was on my stairs. Who should have been dead from two bullets and cried into my hair under fluorescent lights when it was his cousin bleeding out instead.

I look at the man who has never, not once, told me I was crazy.

Every receipt I have says he did it.

I hear myself say it anyway.

"Okay. I believe you."

He was already still, but at those four words—my turn to surprise him with four of them—he goes even stiller.

"What did you say?" he whispers.

"I believe you," I whisper, just a little bit louder. "The world is stacked up against you, all the receipts… and I think I might actually be in love enough to choose you anyway. Can you believe that? I made myself a rule, Ronan. I said I'd never trust a man on faith again. Not ever. Not one point of data less than certainty."

He nods. "I know."

"And yet here I am." A tear slides down my cheek. "I've got nothing but faith, and I'm choosing you anyway."

He comes around the island then. He drops down in front of the stool so his face is below mine, so I'm the one looking down at him the way he always looks down at me.

"I have done terrible things,kotyonok,"he murmurs. "You know most of them now. I took your company. I put a spy in your house. I have hurt men and I have not lost sleep over it. I will not sit here and pretend I'm clean, because you know better, and Ipromised you I'd never lie to your face again." He takes a breath that shudders through his whole body. "But I did not do this. On my mother's grave. On Hayden and Isabella. I would never take their father from them. Not for a business. Not for anything. Do you understand me?Never."

It's my turn to whisper, "I know."

"Someone did thistous." His hand comes up, hovers at my knee, asking. I let it settle.

"Lev." I put my fingers in his hair. It's the first thing I've been sure of all day. "You're going to find him?"

His face twists into an inhuman snarl. "I am going to find him and make him wish the man who shot Navi had shot him instead. He tried to take you and the kids away from me by dressing a murder up in my clothes, and for that—" He stops. He presses his forehead to my knee. "For that, I will make him pay."

I slide off the stool so I can get down on the floor with him, right there on the kitchen tile. I take his ruined face in both my hands and I kiss him.