“I had to, baby,” I whisper into her ear, attempting to curb my out of control jealousy. “He tried to hurt you. I couldn’t control myself.”
Her body physically deflates as she returns my hug, twining her arms around my neck.
“If he would’ve been looking at you that way, I would’ve killed him as well,” she confesses, and my cock twitches automatically. My blood-thirsty, gorgeous psychopath. “But you’re still a fucking asshole. We needed to get information out of him. I need to know if—” She closes her mouth abruptly, stepping away from me and scratching absently at the back of her neck.
Instantly, my curiosity is piqued as I stare at her. “Need to know what?”
“Mind your own damn business,” she huffs.
“You’re my fucking business, you annoying brat!”
We glare at each other, each willing the other to give in, when she finally sighs, a wariness entering her eyes that hadn’t even been present when we were being shot at.
“Talk to me.” I work to moderate my volume so it doesn’t come out as a demanding growl. I’m slightly mollified when she nods once.
“I think…I think my brothers may have something to do with what happened to me,” she confesses, and the pain darkening her eyes makes me want to kill someone. Or multiple someones.
“I thought you said that you thought they were innocent?” I try really, really hard to keep the accusation out of my tone.
But, fuck, if she suspected this entire time…
“I didn’t think so when we went to their house for dinner,” she admits. “But then…”
“But then?” I tap my foot impatiently. “I don’t have all day, woman.”
“Fuck you!” she hisses, some of her familiar fire returning. I quickly try to suppress my grin. Because, yeah, sometimes I’ll purposely rile her up just to see that spark in her eyes. Anything’s better than a morose Emily.
“You just did,” I quip dryly. “Now, are you going to talk, or do I have to spank the information out of you?”
“Asshole,” she hisses.
“Bitch.”
“Cumstain.”
“Donkey’s anus.”
She glares at me before sighing a second time, pushing her hair away from her bare breast. Fuck, it’s a really, really bad time for my cock to be thinking of fucking her tits.
Her next words, however, dampen my arousal.
“I found Burke’s phone number in Ray’s pocket. I think…” She trails off, swallows, and then tries speaking again. And despite her ire, I realize that her sadness hasn’t dimmed an iota. The emotion consumes me like a tidal wave sweeping over the beach. “I think they might have given the money to Burke to pay for you guys to kill me. I think that they may be the ones who want me dead.”
CHAPTER 21
“No killing,” I stress, leveling the men with my most serious gaze. When Sin pouts, lower lip protruding forward almost comically, I narrow my eyes. “I mean it. No killing.”
“But—”
“No torture either,” I add before he can say whatever the hell he was going to say. Probably something about eyeballs melting down my brothers’ faces like ice cream cones left in the heat.
Because, despite everything, I still love the three of them. They’re my brothers, and I have years of memories that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to eradicate. Once, my dad took us on a boat he bought from a family friend. We stopped at a miniature island, completely overrun by tall trees and straggly weeds. There was a branch that hung over the water with a rope attached to it. All of my brothers had used the rope to jump into the turbulent water, but not me. I was too petrified that I would drown.
When my brothers discovered my irrational fear, they all crowded around me.
“I’ll be right at the bottom,” Henry assured me in a way that instantly soothed my frayed nerves. He always had such a calming presence to him, a way to innately pacify a person’s emotions. “You won’t ever drown when I’m there to help you.”
“I’ll jump first, yeah?” Colton added eagerly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He seemed to personify energy and jubilance; so much emotion rested inside of his five-foot something, ten-year-old body. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t smiling.
“Em, grow a pair of ovaries and do it,” Ray growled. His thin arms were folded over his chest as he glared at me, somehow making me feel incredibly small and vulnerable. At the same time, I felt…empowered. Capable of doing anything I set my mind to, if only to prove the bastard wrong. “Do you really think we’ll let anything happen to you?”
My dad, reading a novel on a moss-covered log, merely smiled at me, and that smile chased away the lingering doubts that consumed my mind. In one eloquent look, he replaced spiders, darkness, and fear with flowers, light, and bravery. I could still feel my initial panic skittering through my stomach like a parade of angry bugs, but they no longer overwhelmed me.
“Hey,” Avery says now, shaking me out of my morose thoughts. I can see the strain my confession made on his face as well. Because, despite his relationship with me, he’s still best friends with my brothers. It would destroy us both to discover they had been behind this the entire time.
You don’t naturally expect that the person you love most in the world will be the one to destroy you. On second thought…maybe you do. Maybe you’re one of those few people in the world that has never had anyone you can trust implicitly, with your heart and soul. But my brothers? They’re my people, a ribbon of sunshine that disrupts the monotony of darkness. It’s inconceivable that they would betray me like this, that they would want me dead. But in a way, everything about this story is inconceivable, isn’t it? In any story you read, a person like me wouldn’t be the heroine. I’d be the villain, the girl that the actual heroine destroyed to save the
