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“The fuck?”
“No, you don’t get to do that.” She pushed my hands off her, getting up. Her pillow fell to the floor as she stalked her over to a window that gave views of rich gardens bathed in moonlight. My god dad and Brielle had a state park basically out there and was almost as big as my own backyard and what my grandmother had planted. Sloane hugged her arms. “You don’t get to get mad at me. Not when you were keeping something so big from me.” She raised her hands. “He said he helped you find Mayberry?”
So, my grandfather had been running his mouth and starting shit. I rubbed my mouth. “Why were you at that house today?”
“Why the fuck can’t you answer a single question?” She got in my face, my little fighter here and ready to play. This was the shit that made me bleed for her, how she stood up to me and didn’t give a fuck, but right now, I was being tested. She’d had contact with my grandfather, and that pissed me the hell off. Her arms still crossed, she scanned my eyes. “Why did you do what you did? He told me he tried to blackmail you, and you tried to kill him. Poisoned him.”
Hearing the words from her didn’t feel good, nor how my stomach felt to see the reality of them still in her fucking eyes.
It won’t go away.
How could it? This shit was too big to forget. It was forever.
She ran her fingers through her hair, her sigh heavy. I didn’t say anything, and eventually, she looked at me again. “Tell me what was going through your mind back then. I want to listen. I want to hear you. Understand it.”
I swallowed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do.” Her voice broke as she got close to me, daring to. She might not be comfortable in this situation, comfortable with me and what we were talking about but she closed the distance between us anyway. She put her hands on my face. “I am here. I am, and I’m not going anywhere, and you should have trusted me to handle this.” She shook her head. “I mean, aren’t we done with these secrets? These lies? You told me in your email you were trying to understand me. Well, I’m trying to understand you now. You said you trust me, but I don’t think you do.”
I did trust her. I trusted her with everything. My attention veered to the space behind her, the floor, and anywhere I could look but her.
This made her laugh in response, dry, throaty. Her jaw shifted. “You really can’t answer anything.”
“I want to know why you were at that house and talking to that son of a bitch. How he got in your head and how, for some reason, you can’t fucking see that he was manipulating you.”
“Manipulating me?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “He is manipulative. He’s a son of a bitch, and clearly, he’s worked his magic on you.” I gripped my hair. “Did he tell you exactly how he tried to blackmail me?”
“He said he threatened you.”
“He threatened my mother,” I said, causing her to blink. I smiled, tight, but found nothing at all nice about this moment, nothing good about being right and her being wrong. “He threatened her life, then tried to go back on it. Said he didn’t mean it and was just desperate to have a relationship with me.”
She swallowed. “He mentioned being desperate.”
“Well, he was, so yeah, I felt threatened. I was trying to protect my mother and my family.”
She cuffed her arms, and I laughed, dry as hers had been.
“And did he tell you about what he did after? How after I did try to poison him, he had me arrested to teach me a lesson? By the way, that was what happened that day at the cabin. He fed intel to the cops to come pick me up after I kidnapped Mayberry.”
Her head shot my way, and I nodded.
I got close. “Did he tell you how it felt that day I did poison him?” My throat flicked, nostrils flaring. “How before the nerves got to me so bad I hurled my fucking brains out just in anticipation of knowing what I had to do? Who I had to be to protect my mother and my family?”
She fanned lashes over glassy eyes, her own throat shifting. She took a step forward, but I eased back.
“How about how it felt like I died a little bit after? How I had died and could never get back who I used to be?”
“Dorian…”
I locked up when she touched me, attention veering, averting. I couldn’t have her looking at me in any way that would make my stomach twist even more.
I couldn’t handle it.
“Why were you at that house with him?” I asked again. “Tell me before I lose my mind.”
I dared to look at her then and saw exactly what I didn’t want to see. I saw sympathy, yes, but also that same thing from before running in her irises’ depths. She’d looked at me in many ways in the past, the best when she was hot for me, ready. Later, that erratic burn only ignited when something else deeper developed beneath it. It was what made her bleed for me and that love she always said she had for me. It was still there, but something else was too. It was something that killed me and something I always knew about myself, but I hadn’t wanted her to see. I’d never wanted that for her and us, but it was there now.
