AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh…”
Once we reached the landing outside of his room, he slipped his hand in mine, bringing my fingers to his mouth where he kissed my ring.
“It’s important to me.”
“Then it’s important to me too.”
But damn if my body wasn’t screaming at me to say fuck tradition. Let’s do this now, over and over and over again. But that wasn’t happening.
At least not tonight.
THIRTEEN
elias
The morningafter the engagement party I was up early staring at the newly prescribed meds I was to take. A combination I requested because of a certain woman who was now embedding herself into my soul.
So many thoughts crashed in my mind one after another. What if this doesn’t work? What if I fuck this up? What if I hurt her? What if I hurt her so severely that she walks away, unable to forgive me?
The easiest way not to feel or suffer from disappointment or abandonment was to never get attached. To never let people in. Not to trust because trust led to expectations and expectations led to relying on people to uphold them.
Shortly after I discovered who I truly was, when those doctors labeled me as damaged goods, I learned that love without conditions didn’t exist. For most anyway. There were a few exceptions. Ezekiel and Lucas were exceptions. My brothers loved me. They didn’t care that I had this thing that lived in me that made it damn near impossible for them to love me at times. But they did, no matter the consequence, no matter how difficult.
That was why I was here, doing this for Ez. I owed him in a sense. My inability to live up to our father’s standards placed demands on his life that were more than they should have been. Lucas dying that night only made things worse. There was no one else for our father to rely on. Only Ez. And the night Lucas was killed, he had been with me, settling the weight of his absence right on my shoulders. I should have been able to prevent what happened. No matter that Cole was amped up on coke to the point where he was out of his logical mind. A simple argument that should’ve ended with only bruised egos and at worst, a few bruises and broken bones, had ended with the loss of a life. Lucas’s.
“It should have been you, not him.You. Elias.” Those were my father’s only words to me that night.
A few hours later Ez found me in the basement with a loaded gun in my hands. When he approached me, I lifted it to my forehead and told him not to take another step or I’d pull the trigger.
He did but not before telling me, “If you die, I die, Lias. It’s just us. We’re the beginning and the end. We already lost Lucas and I’m barely hanging on. If I lose you too, I won’t make it. If you die I die.”
I put the gun down, he took it from my hands and walked away. A few hours later, I hunted Cole Devereaux down, forced him into the trunk of my car, drove out a few miles from his family home, and I beat him until he was no longer breathing. Then I dumped him back into my trunk, drove him to his family’s property, and left his body just outside the gates with a note telling them that we would never be even but killing Cole was a good start.
A few days later we buried my brother and I left. Ez tried to get me to stay. Begged me to stay but when he realized there was no changing my mind he accepted that I needed this. He let me go and for one year I tortured myself. Drinking, drugs, fighting, excessive amounts of women. Anything I could do to feed that emptiness I felt because my brother died.
Ez stepped in and saved me again. I owed him this. It was my turn to save him. He needed me here. He needed to make peace between my family and hers and now…
I needed Cress…
I fucking needed her and that scared the shit out of me.
There wasn’t much I was scared of other than losing Ez but Cress had changed things. I was fucking terrified of not only losing her but the possibility of breaking her. Destroying her because I lost control. I knew that I would never lay a finger on Cress but I could surely disrupt her life in ways that would make her hate me.
My eyes lowered to the pills once more and I slipped them from the nightstand, tossed them in my mouth, and chased them with water. I closed my eyes as they went down, opening them again when I heard someone enter my room.
“How long have you been up?” Ez frowned at me, lowering his eyes to my bed then back to my face trying to gauge if I’d slept at all.
I had, barely.
“A while. What’s up?”
I lifted from the bed, walked to my dresser, and removed a black V-neck from the drawer which I pulled on.
“You heading out?”
“Yeah, I have a few things I need to take care of. You need me for something?” I cut my eyes his way and he was watching me.
“Are you going to ask about what happened after you stormed off last night?”
