Page 105 of Cruel Kiss

His arms come around me and haul me in. It's the savage, heart-rending embrace of a man who thought he'd lost everything twenty seconds ago and just found out he hasn't.

"Say it again," he growls against my throat.

"I believe you."

"Again."

"I believe you, Ronan."

He pulls me up off the floor and onto the island, scattering the folder, Mercer's damning pages sliding to the tile, and I don'tcare, I don't care about any of it. He shoves the laptop away without even closing it, ninety-eight point one percent glowing red at the wall, and he peels me out of my clothes right there in the kitchen with the moon coming through the window over the sink.

"The kids—" I gasp.

"Asleep. Both of them." His mouth is at my collarbone, my breast, lower. "Be quiet for me,kotyonok.You know how."

He worships every part of me the way he always does, the stretch marks, the soft places, the parts I spent a decade learning to hate, like they're evidence of something good instead of something wrong. And when he finally comes up over me, when he pushes inside me with nothing between us because there's never anything between us anymore, he grabs my jaw and makes me look at him.

"Eyes open," he says. "I want to see that trust in your eyes."

"It's there," I sob as he spears me open.

"Show me. Fucking show me, my queen." His forehead drops to mine. "I don't deserve it. You know that. Every receipt says I don't."

"I know."

"Then why?—"

"Because the receipts aren't everything," I tell him, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and he shudders. "Sometimes, the data's wrong and the person's right. I've spent my whole life trusting the numbers and this one time—thisonetime, Ronan—I'm trustingyouinstead."

He buries the deepest he's ever gone, and then we finish together, silent and trembling, the only two solid things left in a world that keeps falling to pieces again and again.

As we settle back down, he presses kisses into my hair. "We're going to fix this," he promises. "And when it's done, you'll never have to run a query about me ever again."

I laugh, wet against his skin. "That's a big promise."

"I'm good for it." He tips my chin up. His eyes are still red, but there's something in them now that wasn't there an hour ago. Something that looks a lot like the thing at the lake, the thing he said to Isabella, the thing he swore he'd do his best at. "I love you, Calista Meadows. I know the timing is grotesque. A normal man wouldn't say it here and now. But I'm not a normal man, and I love you, and I need you to have heard it tonight of all nights. In case."

"In case of what?"

"In case the world does the thing it always does." He kisses my forehead. "I love you. That's the only receipt that's ever mattered."

30

CALI

The funeral is on a Wednesday.

I don't know if that means anything. It probably doesn't. But Todd used to say Wednesdays were the worst day of the week, dead in the middle, nothing to look forward to and nothing behind you. I keep thinking about that as we drive out to the cemetery in Queens, with the kids strapped in the back and Ronan's hand loose on the wheel.

I told Hayden and Isabella the truth. I always do now. I sat them down on the couch and I said their dad had died, and that he wouldn't be coming back, and that it was okay to feel however they felt about it.

Hayden went quiet and asked how. I told him someone hurt Daddy, and the police are trying to find out who. That's true enough.

Isabella cried, and then she asked if Daddy was going to be like a caterpillar now and turn into something better. I said maybe. I don't know what I believe about any of that anymore, but I wasn't going to take the hope from her.

She made him a drawing. She's got it flat on her lap in the car, both hands pressed over it so it doesn't crease. She won't let me see it yet.

The cemetery is green and cold and too big. Rows of stones going back forever.