“Stop!” I hear Lily scream, and then Ronan’s voice, too, yelling obscenities at his mum as he lashes out at her verbally.
“Stop!” she screams again, and then I hear anumphfly from her right before Ronan joins his brother in my beating, his foot kicking straight into my gut.
I curl into myself, trying to protect my injuries as much as I can, but it’s useless. These two are a force of nature. Nothing will stop them.
“Please stop!” Lily cries. “Don’t make me do this!”
The twins ignore their mum, but I hear her. The desperation in her tone. The pain.
“Fucking hell. I’m so sorry,” she cries, confusing the fuck outta me, “I have to do this, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you!”
I’m not sure what the fuck Lily is talking about, but Ronan’s kicks disappear before I hear him grunt, and something crashes across the room.
Prying my eyes open in time to see through the gap in my arms, I watch as Lily comes up behind Jude, their feet visible before he stumbles back, gasping as he crashes to the floor a few feet away.
“What the fuck, Mum?!” Ronan hisses, and he comes into view, crawling across the floor to his brother.
“I told you to stop. You should have fucking listened!” Lily snaps in her parental tone.
“How the hell did you do that?” Jude gasps as air fills his lungs again, and I try to figure out what she did to her sons to have them reacting this way.
“You could have killed him!” Lily snaps, and I see Jude’s glare as I try to sit up. “He’s recovering from a fucking stab wound. And you know damn well he’d never fight you back. Is that what you wanted? To kill him?”
“Yes,” Jude snaps, and Ronan hisses, “no.”
“I get it. You’re pissed. You shouldn’t have found out this way. I know that. But Asher isn’t the one you should be mad at.”
Slowly sitting up, I drag myself over to the wall to prop myself against it, the twins standing from the floor, anger still contorting their features as they glare at me.
“Mad? It doesn’t even begin to touch on how we fucking feel!” Jude snaps. “You keep lying to us. Keeping secrets. I don’t even know who you are!”
The pained expression that contorts Lily’s face is heartbreaking. I see it. Her sons see it, yet they don’t crumble, too angry to take a breather and listen to their mum.
“Who the fuck are you?” they ask in unison, doing their weird twin thing, and tears pool in Lily’s blue eyes as she shakes her head, right before the twins storm out.
CHAPTER 35
LILY
No, no, no, no, nooo! This can’t be happening. This has to be a bad dream. I can’t have just been sprung by the twins in a compromising position with their best mate! I just can’t.
“Lily,” Asher’s deep voice rumbles from somewhere, but I can’t see anything but the empty space my sons left behind.
Everything is ruined. Because of me. My sons hate me. They hate their best mate. Joel is dead. My salon has been turned to rubble. My staff no longer have a job. And to top it off, my beautiful sisters can’t have children, and while that’s not directly because of me, if I had stayed, I could have done something to stop it. But I didn’t. I ran off and only thought about myself, and now they’ve suffered too. All of these bad things keep happening to the people around me.
ALL BECAUSE OF ME!
It’s hard to fight off the self-hate. The inner voice that tells me how pathetic I am. How selfish I am for thinking about myself and not considering other people. For even being present in their life in the first place.
It’s a dark hole of despair. One I’ve been in a few times before, yet nothing has ever felt this suffocating.
Nothing!
Why can’t I have a sliver of happiness? Why don’t I deserve that? Why can’t I live in a world where my sons love me andaccept me for who I am? Accept that Asher is part of my life? Accept that I’m a Marx through and through?
I guess they would have to know about the Marx family to understand that. Just more fucking secrets I’ve kept from them.
“Lily.”
