Chapter Nine. Ember #12
“Yeah, Ember, I need to. I need you to listen. You gon’ give that to me, ma?
” That roughened-silk voice steals the breath from my lungs, but I nod.
His lips momentarily flatten into a grim line before he dips his chin in response.
His head lowers, and when he speaks again, his mouth brushes my ear.
“What Michelle wants, she gets. You should know that better than anyone. She set her sights on Marcus, and fucking him behind my father’s and your mother’s backs wasn’t enough.
Not when she could be Mrs. Marcus Cross and have access to the lifestyle that came with it. ”
Shock ripples through me, and I lightly shake my head as if attempting to shake free the low, insistent buzz gathering in my head.
“Marcus was having an affair with Michelle?” I rasp.
“He married her only three months after your mother died. You can’t possibly be that na?ve, baby girl.”
Na?ve? No. In denial and clinging to the last tattered vestiges of hope that maybe, just fucking maybe, Marcus wasn’t as much of a soulless piece of shit as my suspicions whispered? Yeah.
But in seconds, Asad stripped those busted and warped rose-tinted glasses away.
Goddamn him. Godda—I gasp, horror and a sharp agony striking me in the chest so hard my hand releases the doorknob and splays over heart.
“Did he…?” The thought crashes against my skull, loud and angry. But my throat cinches closed around the words. I can’t squeeze them past the constriction. I lick my lips and try again. “Did he ki—”
“Did Marcus kill your mother?” Asad raises his head, cocks it as he stares down at me, his dark, thick brows arrowed down over his arctic gaze.
“No, not that I’m aware of. Marcus might’ve been a shit husband who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and didn’t know a mu’fucking thing about through sickness and health, but he didn’t murder her.
But when Michelle became aware of your mother’s cancer diagnosis, she became a widow within months.
One day, my father was healthy, and the next, he was a walking skeleton throwing up blood and pissing on himself.
” A smirk rides his mouth, but a gloriously hot fury sears away the ice from before.
“The truly fucked-up part? Toward the end, I believe my father knew she was poisoning him. It was in his eyes—this sad, almost resigned knowledge. But instead of saying anything to the doctors, shit, to me, he lay in that hospital bed, wasting away. She played the grieving-widow part to perfection. No one suspected. Just me. But she knew I wasn’t a threat.
She knew I would keep her fucking secret. ”
“Why did you?” I whisper.
He leans farther back, his arms falling to his sides, his hands sliding into his pants pockets. A long, silent moment passes between us, and it possesses a heavy, thick heartbeat.
“Because she’s my mother,” he finally says, voice flat, void of emotion. “And if my father didn’t say anything to save himself and betray her, I couldn’t either.”
The logic is fucked-up.
And yet, I get it.
It’s why I could hate my father in one breath and still be unable to fully exorcise that part of me that yearned for his approval. Hungered for his love.
“I’m sorry, Asad.” My hand lifts seemingly without my permission, but as it hovers over his jacket-covered forearm, I freeze.
Staring down at it, I slightly shake my head, then lower it back to my side.
“I’m sorry about the loss of your father,” I say again.
“It’s been thirteen years since my mother’s been gone, but the pain, the grief of not just their death but of who you could’ve been if they’d stayed, never truly leaves, does it?
The sense of being cheated of the life you could’ve led, of…
” Being loved. I swallow, unable to vocalize that too-telling admission.
“So yes, I’m sorry that all these years you have been alone in honoring the memory of Khalil Amir Prince. You won’t be any longer.”
He stares down at me, but his throat works as if he, too, is swallowing down a response.
I shake my head and step to the side. Again.
And then again. Placing distance between us.
“But what you just shared with me only solidifies my earlier point. When it comes down to it, you’ll always choose Michelle.
Like you said, she’s your mother. I don’t have the benefit or grace of trusting you.
As you reminded me, it can literally get me killed.
And I don’t trust you to intervene. So-called fiancée or not. ”
I don’t wait for the ice-cold bite of rage that will surely come in a scathing insult.
Instead, I grip the doorknob again, twist it, and pull open the door.
My heart pounds in my chest, the rhythm pulsing in my throat, chest, and belly, as I tread down the hall to the elevator.
When the doors open, only then do I turn around and glance back toward the conference room door.
But the corridor and the doorway are empty.
And if I’m disappointed that Asad didn’t follow me, didn’t try to convince me that I was wrong, that I could trust him—that he would choose me before this organization, this family, his mother—well, it’s nothing I haven’t experienced before.
No one has ever prioritized me.
No one has ever put me first.
Loved me enough.
So I’ll do what I always have.
Go to work.