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But I looked at him, anyway, and I didn’t mean to, but I totally hiccupped out another sob. Great. Tears couldn’t be very far behind now.
He touched my face, looking as pained as I felt. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
I swallowed with a wince and nodded.
“Good.” His smile trembled as he added, “Then trust me now, and forget about Gracen for a minute, okay? Because I need you to listen to what she has to say. I absolutely cannot have this between us, and I can’t be the one to tell you, either. It’s her confidential story. And if you still don’t believe her afterward, fine. All three of us—you, me, and Gracen—will drop her from our lives completely.”
“Hey now,” Gracen started uneasily, not a fan of being included in that statement, but Fox shot him a hard glance.
Gracen scowled back but shut his mouth after glancing at my face.
Fox turned back to me and pressed his brow to mine, adding, “I think you’re going to believe her, though.”
I shook my head, and a single tear trailed my cheek as my entire body went cold. A strange fear of the unknown seized me. “I’m not sure I want to hear this,” I admitted, my voice trembling.
“I’m even more certain you don’t,” Yellow confirmed sympathetically. “But the past seems to have caught up with the present, and it’s not going to go away. Not this time.”
Fox touched my cheek and made me look back at him. “You’re strong,” he assured me with a steady, believing nod. “You’ll weather it.”
Oh, Jesus. I felt suddenly sick to my stomach.
“Okay,” I said, anyway, glancing toward all three of them, my eyes narrowing when they glided over the adulteress and my betraying brother. “Let’s do this, then.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fox
“Can I ride over with you?” I asked Bella as Gracen escorted Yellow away to walk her to her car.
I didn’t want to be apart from her, not for even a minute right now. I felt too raw and shredded by what I’d just learned. And besides, I was worried I might go on a violent killing spree of the one-man kind if I left her side.
“What?” she asked, staring after her brother walking away with El.
I shook my head, still trying to adjust to the fact that Gray was El’s Twelve. I’d been right to describe him as a pretty boy. And she’d been right to think he reminded her of me. We’d been raised together; we probably had a lot of similar core values and ideas. Hell, we both even sang in the car to songs on the radio.
Damn, I really should’ve gotten a clue when she told me she’d met him at the movies. He was the biggest movie nerd I knew. There’d been so many clues, and I had never caught on.
I felt like an idiot for never putting it together.
“I can’t believe he
fucking kept this from me,” Bella rasped from a hoarse voice, her chin trembling as she watched Gracen hug El before stepping back to let her climb into her car.
I shrugged, not feeling the same betrayal. Because I knew more than she did. Touching her elbow to get her to tear her attention away from them, I regretfully murmured, “You haven’t exactly been forthright with him lately either.”
She jerked as if I’d just slapped her, so I released a pained breath and more brightly but cringingly added, “But, hey, it looks like he knows about us now.”
“I told him,” she admitted with a nod. “When I tried to get him to come down here and spy on you and your…” She swallowed with a painful wince before adding, “Client. But he sided with you and refused, so...”
“So you came down here to spy on me yourself,” I concluded, trying to ignore the nip in the center of my chest over her failure to trust me. She had trusted me enough to agree to meet with El, though, so I was going to focus on that.
Eyes watering, she reached for my arm. “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe you,” she tried to explain.
I covered her hand with my own, understanding. “It was that you couldn’t believe anyone in that situation. I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shook my head, unable to be mad at her. “No, don’t. It’s fine. It’s okay. Let’s just go.”
