“Your one true love,” she breathed, her eyes welling with tears for a woman she’d never even met, and my grip tightened on her cheek as I shook my head, hating myself for what I was about to admit, but needing her to hear it more than I needed to keep lying to myself or anybody else.
“No, Spider,” I breathed. “Ava was…a beautiful daydream. She was sweet and naive, and she liked the things my dirty money could offer her while turning her gaze from the dirty acts which earned it. I was in love with the idea of her, and with the idea of the man she pretended I was. And she was no doubt in love with that man too. We had something which meant a great deal to me, but it was a lie. That’s a lot of the reason for the guilt I feel over causing her death. She turned her eyes away from the truth of who I was and by the time she was forced to face up to the reality of me, it had already come to claim her innocence and destroy it as brutally as possible.”
“You said you took my innocence,” Brooklyn said with a frown and I nodded, running my thumb across the seam of her sweet lips as I drank her in.
“The very last piece of it, I’ll wager,” I agreed.
“So what are we doing here? Because I don’t want a pity wedding based on nothing but the destruction of my hymen, Hellfire.”
“You’re supposed to give your virginity to someone who matters, Spider,” I said to her firmly, gripping her cheek harder as she tried to look away from me and making her listen.
“You do matter,” she breathed, her eyes pricking with tears again and I pressed on, not wanting to be the cause of more pain for her.
“So do you,” I growled. “And this is me proving it. You matter more than my fear of what my love might cost you. You matter more than my insecurities about not being enough for you or being a burden on your heart. You matter more than the family who I have been forced to stay loyal to for my entire hellish life and you matter a whole lot more than some fucking Russian woman who I’ve been told I have to marry.”
“I don’t underst-”
“When we return home, my obligations won’t go away. My pa won’t give a fuck about you even if I tell him I love you and I want to burn the fucking world down for you.”
“You love me?” she breathed, her eyes going wide like saucers and I leaned in to kiss her, making sure she had no fucking doubt about the truth of that fact as our mouths collided and that molten heat which burned between us exploded through my veins, making me want to dive right into it and never stop burning for her.
I forced myself to pull back, touching my forehead to hers as we both closed our eyes and let ourselves feel this thing we’d been denying for too long.
“I’m yours, Brooklyn,” I reminded her. “And no man of yours is going to make you into his mistress while he marries some fake, Russian bitch who his pa chose for him.”
“You choose me?” she whispered in a voice so small I barely even heard it, and the disbelief in those simple words cut into me heart and soul because I knew that it was my fault that she doubted that. I shoulda owned this thing between us from the moment I realised what it was and now I’d gone and forced a wedge right through her trust in me which I was going to have to claw back out again with every action I took around her until she didn’t doubt me anymore.
“It ain’t my choice to make, love,” I reminded her, pulling back and making myself release her, needing her to really look at me and see what I was offering before she just blindly accepted it. “If I make you an O’Brien, my pa won’t have a choice but to accept it,” I told her, so she understood the practicalities of this. “He will be forced to call off the deal with the Russians and accept you as one of his own. That means the O’Brien umbrella of protection will fall over you too. He won’t allow anyone to harm a hair on your head no matter how pissed he is over me going behind his back.”
“What will he do to you for defying him?” she asked and I forced myself not to wince as I thought of the many cruel and unusual punishments I’d no doubt receive for my insubordination.
“Nothing I wouldn’t gladly endure in payment for you, little psycho,” I promised her. “Besides, el burro might even cough up the location to his treasure at some point and then we can just fuck all the way off like I’d planned and be done with my family and everything involving them.”
“So why don’t we just do that anyway?” she asked. “If you only want to make sure you don’t have to marry Anastasia and her flouncy tits then-”
“That isn’t the reason I want to marry ya,” I snarled, making her suck in a sharp breath as she stared up at me, waiting for me to go on so I did. She deserved that much from me after all I’d taken from her. “I want to marry ya because I see everything I am and everything I could ever want to be in you, Spider. You wake me up when the darkness presses in on me and you don’t shy away from the bloodiest, most brutal pieces of my being. Yer a mirror to my cracked and splintered soul but you’re also something so much purer than I could ever hope to be. You’re wild and free and endlessly beautiful because you don’t give a single fuck about what anyone in this boring world has to say about what is right and normal and you just do you. You shine so bright that I haven’t been able to look away from you for a single second since I first laid eyes on ya. I don’t want to look away. And if I can offer you any piece of happiness in this world which is too often filled with bad then I want to do that. I want you smiling and dancing in the rain and barefoot in bloody puddles. I want you crying and raging and all the things in between which make your heart pump faster and your electric eyes spark. I want you gasping my name as I hold you tight in my arms and offer you every broken piece of me to do with as you will, Spider. I just want you. So the question is, do you want me too?”
Brooklyn’s lips parted as she stared at me, my words and declarations hanging in the air all around us, waiting to come crashing down on our heads and make the whole world quake with our union if only she agreed to it.
She sank her teeth into her bottom lip again and I was trapped in that moment, unsure what insanity had led me here and never wanting to stop experiencing it either way.
“I do,” she said loudly, the words ringing out loud and true and making her mine in all the ways that counted for now and for fucking ever.
Brooklyn ran at me and I lifted her into my arms as I caught her, kissing her hard as she wound her legs around my waist and groaning as she rolled her hips against mine.
“You heard the woman,” I barked as she moved her mouth along my jaw and I gripped her arse to hold her in place, looking over her shoulder to the officiant and the witnesses he’d brought to oversee this thing.
“Oh, that was the vows?” he asked in confusion while Brooklyn began to tug at the collar of my la dee da outfit, moving her mouth down my neck and making my cock so fucking hard that I almost groaned out load.
“Yes, it was the fucking vows, what did you think we’d come here for, a fucking natter?” I barked. “She said ‘I do’， I said ‘I do’， so-”
“Actually, you didn’t say-” he began and I growled angrily.