“Yesterday, I thought we were over.”
“You can’t say that. I won’t let you leave me, Jo. Never. I’d been betrayed by women all my life, starting with my own mama. I stayed away from them for fifteen fucking years. But the way I feel about you is nothing like anything I’d felt before. I won’t let you go.”
“But you can’t trust me. When you came here you were looking for Ty in my bed, Laius.”
“It wouldn’t have been the first time a woman cheated on me, but it’d have hurt the most. Would you believe me if I said if I’d found him, though, I still wouldn’t have let you go?”
“I don’t. You’re one of the most jealous men I’ve ever met.”
“I am murderously jealous over you, and only you, baby girl. I’d have probably killed someone…but I wouldn’t have let you go. That’s how much I love you, Jo. That’s how much I’m willing to sacrifice just to be with you.”
She pulled away and stared at me, her face as pale as the dead. I held her hands because I couldn’t bear not to touch her. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. “That someone you’d have murdered, would it have been Ty?”
The only answer I could give her was a long sigh. “What did you want to tell me last night before Rex cut you off?
CHAPTER 27
Tirone
May never glorious sun reflex his beams upon the country where you make abode, but darkness and the gloomy shade of death environ you till mischief and despair drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves.
All my life, all my entire fucking life, I thought my mom was a saint that fell prey to that devil. I thought she did the right, brave thing leaving the monster she was married to. I thought she was just unlucky to have married another. I thought she’d been sacrificing everything just to give me a better home. It was all bullshit. Furore was right about Flores. Talk about living a lie… I’d been living two.
The irony was my father told me the truth so I’d start loving him—like the probability of that was above a fraction—but all it did was making me hate the one parent I thought was worthy of love. Thanks to him, I ended up hating both my mother and father. Because how could I ever love that man?
I’d thought he was a mean guy who didn’t deserve to be a father in the first place, but it turned out he had a good side. He could have been a good parent and yet he’d abandoned me. He’d left me with a gold-digger, lying, whore of a mother, thinking it was best for me, thinking I’d have never forgiven him if he’d taken me from her because I adored her. Well, I adored her because I had no other option. She was the only parent that showed any sign of love for me. Had he taken me to live with him where he could have raised me, where he could have told me the truth, where he could have showed me all that love he’d said he had for me, things would have been different.
Was it odd that I now hated him even more? He’d just ruined one of the very few good things in my life—my mom—for no reason at all except to show me how much he really didn’t want me. What kind of man would think a woman who was a liar, a cheater and a coward was better than he to raise his own boy unless he was a coward himself?
I hadn’t hated Laius Lazzarini more in my life.
Then, as I saw Jo’s head on his chest while he held her like dear life, I knew I was wrong. Now, I hadn’t hated Laius Lazzarini more in my life.
It wasn’t because he was touching the only woman I loved, the one person that was holding me to this life, or because I’d been making love to her all night and at his first appearance she threw herself in his arms.
I hated him because of the look on her face. I knew what it meant because I knew Jo better than herself. That look meant she made her choice even if she hadn’t known it yet.
And she chose him.
Losing my mother was one thing. Losing Jo, too, was going to be the end of me and everything around me.
When she told me to leave last night, saying if Furore had decided to visit, finding us in bed like that would have been the worst way to tell him the truth, I lied to myself and believed her. Deep down, I knew it was because of what I’d said before we went to sleep. Because of the obnoxious feelings she still had for him. I didn’t want to believe it. I lied to myself and gave her some time alone to calm down, hoping she’d see our world through my eyes and realize once again I was only protecting her.
I was a fucking idiot.
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
The demons wailed and screeched. Images of pain and darkness and blood spread out through me like a disease. I wanted to break, to destroy, to maim, to fucking kill.
But if I lost it now, I’d lose her forever. She was all I had left. She was the only one in my life that was worth the fight. One last battle before I won this war or we all lost.
“Ty,” she whispered, lifting her head off Furore.
“I see you two lovebirds have made up,” I said, as flat as possible, but I was quaking like a cortex of an angry volcano.
“I found out I was wrong about my assumption. The reason I wanted to leave your dad doesn’t exist.”
“You think he loves you for you?”