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“Is it really?” I took a sip of wine, hating the fact my hand was shaking. “That means you’re allowed to care about her. Is there some rule book on this?”
He walked away from the window, the distance between us creating a series of chills. “It’s all about staying alive.”
“You weren’t responsible for Sophia’s death. Another man was. A real monster.”
“Are you so certain about that?”
Even after everything that had happened, the answer was easy. “Yes. Please, Arman. Trust me enough to tell me the truth. It’s all I ask of you.”
“The truth will hurt you and I never wanted that to happen,” he said, his voice soft and unnerving, filling me full of hope as well as another tingling vibration of lust.
“Not knowing is much worse. Remember, trust is a two-way street.”
“Oddly enough, I trust you more than almost anyone. What I’m going to tell you is difficult not only for me but for my father most of all.”
“Understood.”
He took a few deep breaths before beginning.
“When I was a kid, my father had a man working for him as an accountant that ended up being his best friend. He was the kind of guy that could light up a room when he walked in, happy in life. He’d been a foster kid and had made good through Pops’ help. He had complete loyalty to the family and was always around. Holidays. Birthdays. So much so that Louie, Francois, and I called him Uncle Tim. He got married and had a kid about the same time I was born. We played together. That much I remember even though I was four or so.”
I took a sip of my wine, wondering why I’d never met my grandfather.
“Anyway, I don’t know all the details except for Uncle Tim and his wife dropped Thomas off one day and he stayed the night. I learned later that his parents were going to a special dinner given it was their anniversary and asked my mom to babysit.” He had a faraway look in his eyes. “They never made it back alive.”
“Oh, Jesus. What happened?”
“The long and short of it was that Pops had one of the soldiers drive them to the restaurant so they could enjoy themselves even more. From what my father believes, one of our enemies thought Pops was in the car.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah. As you might imagine, Pops was crushed. Tim had left guardian papers, asking my father and mother to raise Thomas as their own, which they did without hesitation. The kid was destroyed, Thomas retreating inside himself. It took a few years for him to come out of his shell. He was our brother in almost every way, but there was always a darkness in him. He never talked about his parents. I don’t remember a single time. That is until he was much older.”
“What happened?” Why wouldn’t Daddy tell his daughters about a family who’d raised him? I couldn’t understand.
“You need to understand that for as brutal as my father is, he loves deeply. He treated Thomas no differently than he did his other four kids. But as time went on, Thomas grew angrier, no longer joining in family gatherings. He was broken by the death of his parents, more so than we initially realized. We were in college by then, Thomas determined to live out of the house. Out of the blue, he started acting out more and getting into drugs. He almost landed in jail, but Pops made certain he didn’t have a record. That’s when Pops tried to get him some help and Thomas turned on him, accusing him of having his parents killed. I wasn’t there, but Louie was and from what I heard, it was ugly. In a fit of anger, Pops told Thomas he never wanted to see him again. He even cut off his trust fund, although he had access to the money his parents had left him. It was a blow Thomas couldn’t recover from.”
I moved closer, the darkness in him nearly destroying me. “I’m so sorry.”
“My father was crushed by what he’d said to his fourth son, my mother blaming him. It was a dark time in my family. Louie managed to track him down, but as you might imagine, it didn’t go well.”
“That’s why Louie turned away from the family business.”
He turned to face me finally, a strange expression on his face. “My beautiful and smart princess. Yes, the final straw that pushed him into applying for medical school. It just compounded everything. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”
“Sophia.”
The way he nodded was terrifying. “Before all this blew up, when we were still friends, Thomas and I met a girl at the same time. She walked into the library and both of us were smitten.”
“You argued over her.”
“Not at first. She was dating him, but he was starting to become angrier, so much so she broke it off with him. Then she came to talk to me because she really loved him. So, I confronted him.”
“Because you loved her too.”
His laugh nearly broke my heart. “You have no idea how fucked up the situation was. He was furious I intervened, accusing me of sleeping with her. I wasn’t at the time. I’d actually believed they were getting back together and I’d kept my distance. A month went by then she came by late one night, crying her eyes out. He’d lost his cool and it had scared her. That night is when I crossed the line.”
I moved closer, placing my hand on his arm. “You were a boy.”
