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“It’s too late!” she screamed, ripping away from his hold once again, all the rage and pain of the past eight years exploding in her head. “It’s too late.”
“Now who’s the liar, Alyssa,” he accused her, furious. “Do you believe for one second I’ll accept that?”
“You have no other choice—” She couldn’t accept anything else. She’d suffered, she’d lost her baby, lost the men it had killed her to be torn from, and only in the past two years had she found a measure of peace.
“Oh, siren, you just watch me show you the choices I have,” he bit out, his expression savage, sensual. “And I can prove your words for the lie they are.”
“Kiss my ass, Sebastian,” she raged.
“Oh, I will,” he promised her. “Right before I fuck it.”
“My cue to leave, children,” Landra announced, making her presence known after Alyssa had forgotten she was even there.
“No, it’s my cue to leave,” she told the other woman, backing slowly away from Sebastian. “I’ve had enough.”
“We’re going to discuss this, Alyssa.” But he didn’t move to stop her. He glared at her, his eyes so black, bottomless, but filled with so many emotions she simply couldn’t face them now.
“We have nothing to discuss.” She felt exhausted. “Content yourself with my earlier weakness, Sebastian,” she warned him with what she hoped was firm rejection. “There won’t be another slip. Thank you for the truth, eight years too late. At least now I know what I died inside for,” she told him, the weight of the knowledge dragging at her shoulders. “Too bad you didn’t tell me to begin with. Maybe then there would have been some part of me left for you to return to.”
She slipped from the room without anyone stopping her. Sebastian hadn’t said another word, and that was for the best, she told herself.
Rather than returning to the party to find her father, she left the mansion by the main entrance after calling the chauffeur and giving him her location. She wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and find a way to reconcile the past eight years of her life, eight years of loss and lies, with the reality she was facing now.
The reality that, despite the danger of it, the cousins could have told her the truth. There were any number of ways they could have met with her secretly, at least told her. If they had, the betrayal wouldn’t have followed her every waking moment. Fear wouldn’t have lain about her like a heavy, wet cape, and the belief that the men she hadn’t been able to release had betrayed her wouldn’t have destroyed her from the inside out.
They had shaped her life until two years before. Shaped it to the point that she’d nearly died, believing that the bond she couldn’t break was on her side alone.
They hadn’t trusted her. Not even enough to see her one last time and tell her the truth.
Just as Sebastian had never explained what had happened to the pregnancy test she’d left in the bathroom. The one that hadn’t been there when she’d awakened later that morning to find all the cousins’ belongings gone. If they hadn’t taken everything, then who had?
*
Sebastian forced himself not to race after her. Shane was within hours of landing in D.C., and once he learned the truth of the past eight
years, then they’d decide the best way to handle her determination to push them out of her life.
“’Bastian, I had no idea…,” his aunt whispered.
“I know.” He nodded, a sharp, certain movement. “I had to be certain.”
A baby. A little boy, Alyssa had said. At five months the child would have been fully developed. Unable to survive outside her body, but growing, moving.
“I guess I understand her mother’s abrupt departure from a cold, unfeeling shrew where Alyssa was concerned to one so protective it was sometimes impossible to speak with her without Margot hovering near,” Landra said quietly, her gaze filled with sorrow as she stared back at him. “Had I even suspected…”
At least someone had tried to protect her, Sebastian thought. They sure as hell hadn’t done so.
They’d believed she was safe. Married, and no gossip had been whispered of problems either with the marriage or with Alyssa herself.
They’d failed her, though, in so many ways.
Turning, he made his way back to the bar before staring at the liquor for a long moment. He’d spent those first two years existing in a bottle in one way or the other, to force back the demand that he find a way to see her, one last time. That he explain. That he hold her, let her shed her tears or her rage, whatever she needed to do, before releasing her and continuing to search for the bastard blackmailing them.
Her siren song, he thought painfully. She’d tried—
The door to the small private room opened again.
“Davis.” Landra turned to her lover as Sebastian slowly turned to face him.
