Descent (Black Heart Romance presents Heaven & Hell)

him.
I know I set out to annoy him today, but a wave of emotion rolls over me and I start to wonder if
that was the best idea.
“Look, I don’t know how to do this, okay? I don’t know how to be… whatever I am to you. I just
need a few rules so I know nobody else will get hurt. The only assurance I have is that you won’t kill
me or irreparably… mark me,” I say, for lack of better terminology. “That you’ll let me leave at the
end of this. But that’s not enough. I told you before I need some kind of assurance of safety, not just for
me, but for the people around me. I didn’t think to stipulate that before, but you told me you’d
never…” Even though he said Chef Ryan won’t be fazed, I glance at him before altering what I was
about to say. “Dirtied your own hands with certain tasks, and I think perhaps I took that more literally
than you meant it. I didn’t think you meant you just hadn’t dirtied your own hands, I thought you meant
you hadn’t done that sort of thing at all.”
Calvin shakes his head faintly, spearing a piece of meat. “I didn’t say that,” he says before
popping it into his mouth.
I stare at him. “Didn’t say what? That you’d never killed anyone?”
“No. I never said I wouldn’t irreparably mark you. I said I wouldn’t harm you so badly that you
were incapable of leaving, and I said I wouldn’t physically injure you beyond repair. I said nothing
about not leaving my mark. I can’t make a promise like that. I could let you go right this instant and I
would have already marked you, Hallie. You could walk out the door tonight and never see me again,
but you’ll still carry me with you for the rest of your life.”
My chest feels hollow as he utters the unutterable. It’s indecent, completely fucking depraved to
acknowledge a thing like that.
Unfortunately, I know it’s also the truth.
When a vicious storm finally passes through, its path isn’t left clear. You have to deal with all
the wreckage left in its wake. And even after the arduous work of cleaning up and repairing
everything you thought was damaged, you’ll find tiny fragments of debris and things that are still
broken long after you’ve convinced yourself you’ve put it all behind you.
The storm may end, but life can never return to what it was before it hit.