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Her jaw shifted. “I want to be on your side.”
“Then be on it. Don’t group with them.”
She bunched fingers into her hair. “I want to. I do, but there are things I don’t get.”
“What things?”
Her expression fell. “They said I can’t trust you, and if I can’t, I don’t know if I can trust what you say.”
I started to say something, and she hugged her arms.
“It’s hard, Sloane, because I trust them,” she said. “I trust them with everything. They’re my family, and you’ve…” She started, sighing. “You’ve lied to me before.”
I had lied to her.
And apparently, that had damned me.
The room was silent when her mom bounced into it.
“I found the wine on the way back.” Mrs. Reed waved two bottles. She set them down on the counter. “Though obviously not for you kiddos.”
The woman booty-bumped her daughter, but it didn’t elicit much of a reaction out of her. Mrs. Reed placed an arm around her. “Everything okay?”
Bow, of course, nodded and even stapled on her cuter-than-heck grin. She was terribly good at that, but I always knew when she was putting it on. When she didn’t mean it, her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
Coming over was a bad idea, huge, but I was already here.
If Mrs. Reed knew her daughter was off, she didn’t make a thing of it. She let go of her daughter, then proceeded to get some wineglasses. She’d just placed them down when a large man sauntered into the room and surprised her from the back. Crazy big, he pulled her clear off her feet, and I’d never heard a grown woman squeal so loud.
“Knight Reed,” she gritted, shocked but laughing at the same time. She slapped at his hands. “One day, you’re going to catch me with something hot in my hands.”
“I know the feeling, baby,” the man crooned, and Bow palmed her face when her dad literally planted a kiss on her mother in the middle of the kitchen.
Bow rolled her eyes. “Dad, please. We have guests.”
He seemed not to be bothered by this, definitely bending his wife over in the kitchen, but Mrs. Reed wasn’t having that. She kicked at him until he let go of her, her face flushed. She physically had to force a man the size of a good portion of this kitchen away from her.
“Honestly, Knight,” Mrs. Reed said, but did smile. She eyed me. “And Bow does have guests. Her friend is here to join us tonight for dinner.”
“A friend, eh?” Mr. Reed worked around, his hands sliding into his pockets. He was dressed more casual than the last time I’d seen him. He wore a dark sweater with lightly colored pants. He put a finger out. “Noa Sloane? The friend who is not a boy.”
I laughed at that, and surprisingly, Bow did a little too. When I’d first met her dad, he had believed I was a boy because of my name. I waved. “Still not a boy, Mr. Reed.”
“Very good,” Mr. Reed grunted, but he smiled. He placed an arm around Mrs. Reed. “And a friend of Bow. Always nice to see that.”
He eyed back to Bow, and her eyes lifted again. She really didn’t have a lot of people over, and after talking to her, some pieces were definitely getting put together.
Legacy held a solid place in this girl’s life, which only pissed me off more. Dorian had left bodies in his wake. He’d not only left me, but left me to burn. He didn’t care about me and definitely didn’t care how his friends treated me.
I really wanted to leave. I felt sick, but worse, I felt sick because I felt sick. I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted to feel nothing.
“The hell are you doing here?”
The bark came from across the room, the laughter from Mr. and Mrs. Reed fading. The pair of them swiveled around to find their son in the middle of the kitchen. His hair was wet and his teeth bared. He had a gym bag on his shoulder, a Windsor Prep Football T-shirt across his bulky chest, and he hadn’t come alone.
Wells Ambrose backed him up, his bottle-blond locks also wet with shine. He cleared them from rage-filled eyes. “Why are you here?”
“And why are you both speaking to her like that?” Laughter completely gone, Mrs. Reed clacked her heels in that direction. She folded her arms. “And, Thatcher, what are you and Wells doing? I thought your practice was running long. Why are you here?”
