“You’re right. It’s not.” I can’t quite help myself. I close the distance between us and run my hands up his chest. I lower my voice, until he has to lean down to catch my words. “Broderick, if I didn’t want what you do to me, I would gut you and leave you to bleed out in the hallway. No one, not any of your brothers, not a single Raider in this faction, not even Shiloh, could stop me.”

He doesn’t relax. “I’m bigger than you. Stronger.”

Gods, this man’s respectable streak is tiresome.

Even knowing it will give away my edge, I bend down, dip my hand into the open edge of my boot and draw the long knife I lifted off Shiloh when she wasn’t paying attention the other day. “I would have gutted you,” I repeat.

Broderick blinks. “You have a knife.”

“Yes.” Nothing more to say to that. With a sigh, I turn the knife around and offer it to him, hilt first. “I suppose you’ll be taking this, since it’s a prohibited item for a Bride to have and all that.”

He gets a strange look on his face. “Keep it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Promise me you won’t stab someone without cause, and you can keep it.”

Now it’s my turn to blink. Surely he’s not going to actually let me keep the knife. It’s a weapon, and Broderick isn’t the kind of fool who hands his enemies weapons without a fight. “Define cause.”

“Monroe.”

I sigh. “Okay, fine. I won’t stab someone unless I feel directly threatened. Is that good enough?”

This is where he crushes my fledgling hope, dim though it is, and tells me that no way will he allow me to keep it, promise or no. What good is the word of an Amazon to a Raider, after all? But he simply nods. “Good enough. Now put that away before your uncle and sister get here.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll wait outside while we talk.”

He gives me the look that question deserves. “I will give you the relative privacy of reading a book over there while you talk.” He points at a short chair tucked back within the bookshelves.

It’s far enough away from the couches and chairs in the center of the room that it should actually offer privacy, but I’ve spent more evenings than I care to count in the last three weeks wandering this library. The acoustics are such that any conversation held within this room seems to echo to each corner of it.

As soon as I realized that, my fantasy of fucking Shiloh against some bookshelves went up in smoke—at least if we didn’t want to get caught.