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For once, I didn’t want to fight. Not after I’d come to terms with the fact that this cover had changed me.
He’d changed me.
Or maybe I’d always been this way, and I was just discovering myself.
Bastian ignored me.
Of course, he did.
“You can’t be friends with her.”
This wasn’t happening.
I’d come to the realization a few days ago that Tessie might have been my only friend nowadays, and he wanted to take her away from me?
Over my dead body.
I hoped my glare burned holes in his clearly underdeveloped brain cells.
“So, I’m good enough for you to fuck, but I’m not good enough to be friends with your little sister, who seems to spend more time with me than you or anyone else in your family, by the way. You sure have a way with kids.”
His eyes flared, and anger consumed them, like maybe my words had cut him deeper than I’d intended them to.
I should have given him a stiff drink. And spit in it.
Anything but the juice pouches I used my own money to buy, taking my very little personal time to get, walking to Fifth Avenue despite my mounting back pain, because I already loved that little girl so much, I wanted her to be happier than I could even fathom.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. People come and go. That’s life. But Tessie’s not like us. She doesn’t have to be like us. We can shield her from this world for as long as we can.”
I opened my mouth to retort, but he cut me off, so damned unapologetic, “And don’t deny we need to shield her from you, because the reality is, you’re not always going to be in Tessie’s life, so spending more time in it now will only make it harder when you leave. Or she leaves for that matter. She doesn’t even live in this state.”
Why was he so torn up about it?
Yes, she lived in a different state. People still built relationships long distance. Siblings grew up and moved to other states. Sons moved away from fathers, daughters from mothers.
Life happened. We just had to adjust.
But at the same time, I knew he had a point, even if I wanted to resist it.
I was sent here to take down the very people she loved. I wasn’t doing her any favors by befriending her, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut the strings.
I liked her. I liked the normalcy she gave me.
Some days, I pretended she was my sister, and I had a chance to give her the life I never had.
How fucked up was that?
I shook my head. “Tessie doesn’t need to worry about me hurting her. You, on the other hand—”
“I’m her brother. Nothing you say will change the fact that blood ties us together. I could live across the world, and I would still be her brother.”
He believed it, so I believed it.
Simple as that.
If I were being honest, he really seemed like a good brother. But it also seemed like he repeated it because he wasn’t so sure.
Like, somewhere along the way, the distance between him and his sister had made him uncertain of his place in her life.
