5. Torin
FIVE
torin
“What did you do?” I immediately rise from the couch when I find Ozzy walking into the house, fury boiling over in my veins at what I learned of today from Daddy Dearest.
On top of what my brother has already told me.
“Bay didn’t marry Ramsey,” Emilio says flatly, looking down at a thick set of files in his hands. “So, if you’re going to traipse inside my office like a lunatic, you can take your crazy ex-boyfriend ass and get the hell out.”
I’m shocked, I’m not gonna lie.
I’m also fucking relieved.
And my conversation with Emilio is over.
Until he opens his fucking mouth again.
“She’s married to Ozzy.”
My cousin stands along the edge of the kitchen and the living room, dressed in tattered black jeans and matching shirt as he stares at me like he always does.
Which is shit I can never fucking read sometimes.
“Why did you do it?” I press, a mixture of enraged, irritated, exasperated, and plain jealous.
Yeah, the last one pisses me off even more than I already am.
She’s mine annoyingly enough because I can’t let her go until I’ve fucked and destroyed her out of my system.
I hunger for peace, but I’ve received none. Not when my thoughts are constantly of her, what she’s done, what I’ve done, and how she played me exactly how I initially always thought she would.
Ozzy doesn’t reply, watching me approach him with ease. Completely and utterly with zero fucks given over here and I can’t match him.
I never can.
“She killed Judah.”
“I heard.”
Two words, no emotion.
My hands ball into fists, and I’ve never wanted to hit my cousin before, but right now, I’m tired of everyone acting like I’m a fucking psycho over being upset that my brother is dead by the woman I was fucking.
Who I was in love with.
“She killed Judah,” I repeat to make sure he fully understood me. “She murdered my fucking brother.”
Ozzy’s blue eyes remain locked on mine, but he doesn’t utter another word.
Slowly, I cock my head to the side, not understanding why he would do this to me.
I know he’s watched her and told us where she was and what we needed to know, but this nixes everything. He was the first person I called after Matteo De Leon dropped the fucking bomb on me.
“What are you doing, Oz?” I press. “Why would you…” My next words get clogged in my throat because I don’t want to dredge up his bad shit. The reason he got thrown in prison. The way he is with females as a whole.
Ozzy’s—to put it bluntly—been fucked up in the head since he was a child. He was sitting in a pool of blood when the cops found his parents dead with his baby sister. He’s never been social, really only speaking, which isn’t much, to Reeve, Cairo, and me. With everyone else, he’s pretty immune and off-kilter.
He doesn’t like attention. He’s fine living in the shadows and not dealing with life as normal people do. And I’ve protected him time and time again from Emilio and anyone else who decided to fuck with him.
But I couldn’t save him from Vivian.
And I couldn’t save him from jail time either.
However, now, he’s physically linked to Bay, and that’s obviously a fucking problem for me.
“She was going to marry Ramsey,” he tells me, like I didn’t already know.
“We already knew that,” I retort sharply. “And we also know she’s trying to fuck us all over. All of us, Oz.”
He blinks at me a few times, as if computing all the words I’ve already said to him once over. He’s not slow. He’s sharp as a fucking tack. However, I’m not understanding why he’d stamp his name with hers.
I failed him once before, and I’ll never do it again. Bay fucked me over and spun me into her web, and she’ll easily do it to Ozzy.
However, ever since what happened with Vivian, I can’t see him growing close to her. I can barely see him speaking to her, really.
“Why did you do it?” I ask, my voice calmer, even though my blood won’t stop sprinting through my veins. “Was it…”
Was it for me? Us?
At least with Ramsey, she might not be as easily accessible, but that wasn’t going to stop me. And Ozzy’s not naive anymore. He was young and impressionable when shit went down with Cairo’s bitch. It was the start of why we all hate Vivian’s fucking ass to begin with.
Except with my cousin’s silence, I’m growing paranoid and a little anxious that he did this and got in over his head. He’s watched her for what seems like forever. He’s been privy to all her moves before we were.
He was her demon in the dark and rescued her on a few occasions.
I just hope he hasn’t…
“You like her, Oz?”
His expression doesn’t change, which means nothing. He used the last bit of creamer last week, and Cairo threw a bitch fit while Oz did nothing.
He didn’t care.
That, or he doesn’t know how to fully digest and swallow those emotions.
My cousin has never talked about what happened in prison. If anything happened. We may have had someone on the inside with him the whole time, reporting back that he was just observant and quiet and only got into two fights while he was there but nothing more. Ozzy tries his damnedest not to exist.
“Don’t let her blind you,” I warn, feeling like Emilio right now with the preaching, but I can’t help it. I can’t have him hurt again. “Like she did with me. Like Judah and Reeve. She’s not who we think she is.”
My cousin’s gaze easily unlatches off me, and if I didn’t know any better, it looks like he doesn’t care about what I’m saying. As if it doesn’t affect him.
“Oz, are you even listening to?—”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you?—”
“Because…I wanted to save her.”
Oh, fuck, and hell no.
“Oz—” His blue eyes clench, resulting in me shutting the hell up.
She would be protected to the fullest extent if I didn’t loathe her. If I didn’t want her to feel every single thing I have endured. Not only did she murder my brother, but she shattered my heart, my self-esteem, my pride, and my brain. It’s been in a civil war with the vital organ that has latched onto her so securely it refuses to let her go.
To forget her.
“She’s not worthy,” I grind back. “She wants to put us all in the ground, and you’re one of us. But now that you have her under our control…”
To fuck whenever I want.
To kill.
Now that Judah is dead, it haunts me to no end. I can’t sleep. The remnants of what I remember of him speak back and forth. They chide me for fucking his girl. How I allowed her underneath my skin.
That I didn’t listen.
To myself, to him, to every single red flag.
Vivian did it to Ozzy and had Cairo underneath her thumb for the longest time, so why wouldn’t Bay do the same to me?
And Reeve.
While he’s off getting high, I’m being possessed by what to do and what Judah would’ve done for me if the tables were reversed.
He would take her out, plain and simple.
My brother would never second-guess himself like I’m doing now. It doesn’t matter that he may have had some deep-rooted feelings for Bay, she’d be buried in a shallow hole somewhere. Judah always safeguarded me in every way possible. His whole plan was to build something powerful and yank me out of Emilio’s clutches.
Then he disappeared.
Emilio claimed murder and tore Matteo’s sacrifice apart, but that prick could be lying.
Judah was his right-hand man. There is no denying that. No reason why he’d murder my brother at the time.
“Stay away from her.”
My shaky focus slices back up to my cousin, whose blue eyes just decided to pay attention to me.
I quirk a brow before I repeat his words one more time and challenge, “Or what? You think you’re going to save her from me? You believed I was going to let this all go because you changed sides and took her for yourself?”
He doesn’t answer me, the son of a fucking bitch.
“Why the fuck did you do it?!” I see the slight flex of his brow, as if he can’t decipher if I’m fucking slow or stupid. Nonetheless, this cannot be happening. “If you attached any feelings to her, Oz, lose them now. Because she’s as good as dead from where I’m standing.”
I harden my gaze with my promise, which might as well be a smile because Ozzy doesn’t register it, nor does he react.
A beat goes by before any other words are said, and it fucks me up more than before finding out that she was going to link herself to my oldest brother.
“Stay away.”
“Or what, Oz?”
He doesn’t falter for a fucking second when he replies, “Or I’ll kill you, too.”