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“I think you’re stupid to believe I’d ever hurt her,” I spat back, eyes narrowing. Hunter blazed, but he didn’t say anything more as he weighed my words. I wouldn’t lie to him and say I hadn’t touched his sister. Hell, I’d done a lot more than just touch her, and when I jacked off, it was his sister’s noises I heard in the back of my mind. Her cries and the small purr she made before she fell apart beneath my hands.
Fuck,I couldn’t be thinking about that right now.
“I don’t know what happened, and that’s why I’m here,” I told him honestly, shaking my head. “We’re working on renovations, and I fucked up some wiring and asked her to come into the basement to help me fix it. That’s all.”
Understanding blazed in his eyes, though I couldn’t wrap my head around the reason he understood. Hunter took a long breath before taking a single step backward. “In the basement?”
“Yeah, man,” I told him. “That’s where the fusebox is. I could hire an electrician, but she’s always talked about doing her own electrical, so I thought I’d get her input first. I didn’t think it’d strike a nerve like that.”
He shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t have known. She has a thing about basements. For the past few years, she wants nothing to do with them. She says it’s nothing—just a phobia or something—but she’s petrified of them.”
I paused and considered.A few years. A lot had happened to her in a few years, that was clear, and I wasn’t foolish enough to believe the basement didn’t tie into the rest of it. The scar. The jaded personality that so sharply contrasted the optimist she used to be. Sure, she still put on that front. She still smiled through everything and joked easily with my brothers. But I saw it, and I knew Hunter did, too. Especially from the way concern flashed in his eyes.
“Do you know why?” I asked, my tone going cold.
“If you’re asking me if I know what happened,” he started while shaking his head, “I have no idea. But something did, even if she won’t tell anyone about it.”
I quickly excused myself from Hunter before speeding into my house and ignoring my brothers’ questions. I grabbed a lawn chair and carried it outside before parking it directly on our front lawn, facing it toward Hunter’s property. I crossed my ankle over a knee and waited.
Sierra knew exactly what she was doing by running into her brother’s house. If she were home, I would have broken in and insisted she tell me what the hell happened to make her react that way, but Hunter’s house was trickier. He’d protected her for this long, and I appreciated that. Best friend or not, he wouldn’t keep her away from me. Not when she ran away looking so startled.
So I waited. The sun dipped passed the horizon by the time I realized she wasn’t coming out to go home, and I checked my watch, noting that it’d been well over three hours. Three hours was enough time. Rather than going through the front door and giving Hunter a chance to protest, I strode around the back of the duplex, marking the window I knew was hers. I stepped over the beds full of vegetation and pulled the screen up with little force. Light came through the closed curtains, and I went to raise the window but found it locked.
I narrowed my eyes and clenched my fist, knocking. Nothing. “Tesora, if you don’t open this window in five seconds, I’m going to break it.” She didn’t say anything, but I saw a bit of motion from where her bed sat, and I knew she’d heard me. I wondered if she knew how serious I was about the sentiment.
“Five,” I started, and she moved even more quickly, approaching. “Four.”
“You’re not going to break my brother’s window,” she said, muted slightly by the closed window.
I chuckled darkly. “You don’t know me very well at all if you believe that. Breaking a window is the least I would do.” I waited just a second. “Three.”
The window clicked unlocked, and I didn’t hesitate before shoving it open and lunging through the gap. I pushed past the curtains and finally saw her fully, standing in the same clothes as before. She opened her mouth, but I didn’t stop. I’d given this a lot of thought, and I knew how this conversation would go if I allowed it. It would be a different variation of the same conversation we’d had half a dozen times before. She wouldn’t tell me anything, and I knew that’s how it’d go. This time, I wasn’t going to insist she give me information she wasn’t comfortable sharing.
I pushed her back until she stood flush against her bedroom door. It groaned as she leaned into it, and I pressed my hand against her mouth as I spoke in a low voice. “I want to ask what had you so panicked that you couldn’t stick around earlier, but I’m not going to. I’m not going to ask you a single fucking thing about what happened to you, because I know your response.” Her brows knit together in confusion, and I took a small step away from her, grabbing her wrist and pulling her alongside me. I kept my hand firmly placed on her mouth.
“What—” she tried to say through the hand I had on her mouth.
I pressed her into her bed and finally released my hold, taking a step back. In one fluid motion, I did something I never thought I’d do in front of her. I grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head.
I couldn’t bring myself to look down at the raised scar I couldn’t seem to entirely erase with tattoos, no matter how hard I tried. The stark, raised lines of the “B” would be etched in my skin indefinitely, all because of the day I decided her life was more valuable than my freedom.
“When I told you I was going to come back for you, it was before I got this brand. My dad told me that if I could withstand five days of torture, he’d let me go without consequence. I thought I’d be able to do it until the fifth day, and when that day came, I gave in.” I took a deep breath, knowing exactly where I’d draw the line of my story. She didn’t need to know everything—not yet. But she could know why I hadn’t come back. “I tried to leave, but I couldn’t do it. So I was forced to stay and wear the brand of ourborgataon my chest.”
“What did they do to you?” she whispered. Her eyes fixated on the massive welt.
“A lot of things, but none of it matters. All that matters is that he won and I had to stay. And because of that, I couldn’t come back like I promised. But Sierra,” I said, forgoing the nickname for just a moment so she knew how serious I was. “Itried. I tried so damn hard to get back to you.”
But despite what I said, she only stared at my chest. The tattoos covering the raised skin were supposed to hide it, but they had done their job poorly enough that I never went without a shirt. Frankie knew, but Louis and Tommy couldn’t know that I had only stayed for all of them. Especially not Tommy—not when I’d been the first one to insist he get out while he had the chance.
Sierra lifted her hand and ran her fingers over the flesh on my chest, and I sucked in a gasp. Nobody had ever touched them. Not with gentle intentions. Her touch ravaged me, and I closed my eyes beneath it. I didn’t want her pity or sympathy for my decision, but it didn’t seem like that was what she was doing as she traced her fingers over the raised skin there.
She stood from the bed, coming chest-to-chest with me as she stared into my eyes. I didn’t know what I expected, but her lips pressing into mine was far from it. She pulled away quickly, shaking her head. “I didn’t know that,” she admitted. “I can’t talk about it right now, but I will eventually,” she promised. “I need time.”
Even thinking about it had her limbs trembling.
“Okay,” I told her, my eyes catching on that damn scar across her forehead. I allowed my gaze to flicker off it and meet her eyes as I moved a hand up her cheek and brought my lips back down on hers.
There was one thing I knew she needed above all else right now, and it was a distraction. I could give her that. I wound my hands around the back of her neck and pulled her closer, enveloping her body with mine. She molded into me before trying to pull away. “My brother,” she mumbled against my lips.
