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I frown. “Hmm…”

“No serial killers allowed, either” she says, turning her face to me and resting her chin on the back of the hand on my chest. “Way too cliched.”

“Fair.” I draw in a breath of her scent. “Okay, Marcus Aurelius.”

Bella snorts and rolls her eyes. “Come on. The father of Stoicism? Really?”

“What's wrong with that?” I ask.

“It’s just sooo on the nose!”

“I happen to connect with his writing, actually⁠—”

“Yeah, I bet you do!” She hoots out a laugh. “God, you are such a dork!”

She shrieks and spasms and fights me off as my hand quickly snakes under her armpit and starts tickling her.

“Okay, dickhead,” I grunt. “Who’s yours? Lizzie Borden? Bloody Mary? Tonya fucking Harding?”

“Vesna Vulović.”

“Bless you.”

She rolls her eyes as I grin at her.

“I have no idea who that is.”

“Allow me to educate you,” she says, hiding a smile. “She was a Serbian airline stewardess in the '70s who holds the record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. A bomb went off in the plane's cargo hold, and she was the only survivor after the plane fell thirty-three thousand feet.”

My brow arches incredulously. “No way is that true. Thirty-three thousand feet? How the fuck is that even possible?”

“She got trapped by a beverage cart, so she didn’t get sucked out of the plane. Also, she had very low blood pressure. The doctors said that's why her heart didn’t explode during the rapid descent.”

I blink. “And she lived.”

“I mean, she broke her legs, half her ribs, three vertebrae, her pelvis and her skull, and was in a coma afterward. Oh, and paralyzed. She had to learn to walk again,” Bella shrugs. “But yeah. She lived.”

I whistle low. “Shit.”

“And get this. She wanted her old job back after she was able to walk again. This boss bitch wanted back on airplanes.”

“She sounds fucking psychotic.”

“Right? I love her,” Bella grins.

I roll my eyes. But then they land on her again and linger on the smear of blood on her throat. The drops along her collarbone and in her hair.

Bella stretches languidly against me, grinning lazily as she drops her cheek back to my chest.

I’m weirdly very okay with how comfortable she's making herself with me.

“You might be an uptight control-freak of a fake husband,” she sighs against my skin, “but I’ve certainly had worse post-murder evenings.”

My brows knit.

“What’s your body count?”

Bella’s head snaps up.