"I gave my darkest secrets to a man who doesn't exist."
Embry: " . . . you don't understand."
Mateo lowered himself to sit, still vibrating with the need to fix me, the way he always did. "Then tell me. Explain it like I'm the simplest idiot you've ever met."
I can't. I'd never told anyone. Not the judge, the jury, or the legal aid barrister who'd written me off before she'd ever met me. But as I drowned in Mateo's affection, in a love I'd done nothing to deserve, the words came tumbling out.
Bad words. Dark words. Darker than sin. Darker, even, than Mateo's battered soul and the secrets I didn't know about yet. I thought those words would shatter me. Shatter us. But when the devil came for us, it wasn't mine.
It was Mateo's, and the man I'd trusted with my fragile heart was a stranger more broken than his scars could ever show.
