Chapter 11 Mateo #2
“All he is doing is pushing her away, and she gets further and further from trusting us enough to tell us the truth. If you want my opinion, this is going to blow up all over us.” He no sooner said, and the elevator dinged.
I sucked in a big breath in anticipation as I waited for Ronan to make his way in.
He looked at us both on the couch watching the surveillance and raised both eyebrows at us.
“Say what you need to say, you’ve clearly been talking.
” He crossed his arms over his chest as he waited for us to berate him.
“There’s nothing to say man, you made up your mind about her…” Santos said.
I cut him off to announce my piece, “I won’t work her anymore.”
Ronan’s eyes opened in alarm at my proclamation.
“Is that so?” he asked me, turning his head like a confused dog.
“Yeah asshole, that was fucked up. If you want to torture her, do it yourself. I don’t need one more thing keeping me up at night,” his demeanor changed with my last remark as he softened from my words.
He sat down on the white leather chair opposite the couch as he slumped his shoulders.
“I get it,” he said, and even though I was kind of taken aback by his understanding, I wasn’t completely surprised. He knew what kept me awake in the dark of the night, and he wouldn’t fight me on this.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was.
I don’t know what it was supposed to be like, because I lost that a long time ago.
But having her here, in our home, all of the time.
She’s under my skin. She’s in my head. Always laughing at me for pulling one over on me when she got the opportunity.
And every time I give her the chance to tell me the truth, she reels back farther from it like I’m the one who deserves to be punished,” he said scratching the side of his head in anxiety and in that moment, I felt for my brother again.
He too was just a lost little boy whose heart was broken by the only real thing he ever had.
I rubbed my temples to ease the pressure building up again, and Santos looked at me with concern, but I shrugged him off.
“It’s like watching a wolf with the moon,” Santos said to our brother, looking up from the monitor once again. “You lose your fucking mind over her, obsessing non-stop, all day. But if you had her, really had her again, and not just locked up downstairs. You’d probably go full lunatic.”
Ronan shook his head as he drowned in his self-created misery, and said, “I’m gonna go work out. Call me if you need me.” He headed to his room and came out almost instantly holding his gym bag.
“Is that all you do now?” I asked, pushing to get a rise out of him.
He spent most of his time in our gym now, either lifting weights or beating the shit out of the lower-level grunts in the fighting ring. The guy was getting bigger than I even thought was possible for him.
“If I don’t take it out somewhere, I’ll take it out on her and…”
“You don’t want to do that?” álvarez interrupted him, scoffing at our brother’s selective methods of cruelty.
“Fuck you,” he swung his bag over his shoulder hitting Santos in the head as he made his way out to the elevator.
The gym was on the fourth floor so he wasn’t going far, we kept it tight around here so that we wouldn’t have to leave the security of the high-rise for a lot of things we needed to do on a daily basis.
It was important that we stayed in the high-rise unless we were doing business that required us to leave.
It wasn’t something we required out of all of our men, but as the ones making the decisions it was necessary for us to not only stick around, but to stay behind to protect our people.
The entire next week got away from me, and most of the next. I spent most days waiting for the alarm to go off on my phone so I could find a reason to be down there with the siren that was taking up all the space in my painful head.
Ronan took Cecilia to her special “room” at least once a day for a few hours at a time. She was getting visibly skinnier now because she barely ate her food, even though álvarez was cooking her every possible meal if he wasn’t sneaking her all the best take-out spots from Cove City.
Ronan rarely stuck around after her sessions in the soundproof chamber were over, always itching to avoid the always present conflict between the two of them.
I walked past the kennels and found him opening the door and pulling her out, but she was so different from the first time I pulled her out of the box.
It was as if this had been hardening her instead of breaking her like he planned, and my admiration for her grew because she was a soldier just like me.
He nodded my way as he acknowledged my arrival, I shot my hand out to catch the keys as he tossed them at me and shouted back, “I gotta go pick up some things for tonight.”
I nodded back as I walked closer to the one thing that had been running through my mind all week no matter how hard I tried pushing any thoughts of her away. I stuck my hand out at her and tipped my chin in the other direction to signal her to take my hand and follow me.