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“If you’d been honest from the start—”
“I couldn’t!” she shouts.
“Why?” I’m not accepting that answer. Not anymore.
“BecauseIwas protectingyou!”
“Why?” I yell even louder, ready for some goddamn honesty.
She hops off the counter and comes right up to me, the knife to my throat before I even see it get pulled. “Because you’re weak. You can’t choose between me and your family. But I can choose between you and mine.” Gritting, she repeats, “I. Can.”
“I can’t choose because youaremy family. You are my fucking family, Lex!”
Tears well in her eyes, spilling over long, unblinking lashes to stream down her cheeks, but she doesn’t reciprocate the sentiment.
Fine. I’m not hers. I knew I probably wasn’t, but…
Fuck, it still hurts.
“Then let me make it easy on you.” I crowd her, the knife’s edge digging into the skin under my jaw. “I’ll choose for you.”
We hold each other’s eyes, every moment from the last couple days passing between us.
“Make it hurt,” comes out of my mouth quiet but steady.
Stepping back, Lex throws the knife at the wall, burying the tip into one of the logs the cabin’s made of.
“I already chose. Cyrus knows, Reece. Heknows.” She clamps a hand over her mouth like she’s about to puke.
“Knows what? What does he know?”
Through her fingers, she whispers, “He knows everything. He knows where my mom lives, he knows we’re…” She gestures between us with her free hand. “He probably even knows I can’t pay ten million dollars.”
“Why the fuck did you agree to?”
Lex doesn’t answer, just shakes her head.
“Lex! Fucking talk to me!”
Her hand falls away from her mouth, her face red and wet and so fucking broken it kills me. “I chose my family.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means in order to keep my mom out of it, he’ll get…”
Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it.
“…me.”
“No.”
“I have to. Ihaveto.”
“No. You don’t. We’ll find another way.”
“There’s no other way.”
“If you knew you couldn’t pay, why’d you even fucking offer?”
