Chapter 13 Bash
Bash
The fling of the door sends a gust of wind across my back, and I flinch at the sharp slam as Cato storms into the room.
For a long moment he says nothing and simply stands behind me with that overbearing presence, and it chips away at my patience until I can’t take the silence anymore.
“Are you going to say something?” I finally ask.
“You want to tell me what the fuck that was all about, Dom?”
The name stings more than I expected after hiding behind it for so long. It’s tainted now, poisoned by the real one spoken aloud, and coming from his lips, it feels like a lie.
It is a lie.
All of this is a lie, and I’m no better than a con man behind a counterfeit smile.
“It was nothing,” I mutter, desperate for him to leave me to my thoughts.
Cato isn’t so easily swayed.
He grabs the back of my chair, spinning me around to face him. I set my jaw and meet his eyes. They’re hard, impenetrable in the way he so often is, but I know the softness that lies beneath that rough exterior.
“Nothing?” he repeats, gripping my chin when I try to look at the floor. “You want to call that stunt nothing? I let you get away with it this time because you’re hurting, but kiss me again and I’ll knock you on your ass. You don’t get to use me.”
Shame settles heavy in my gut. It’s an emotion I rarely face, because my choices are almost always governed by logic rather than impulse. But after letting everything boil over earlier, it sits there now, and it’s undeniable.
Cato and I met years ago, when I was little more than a ghost of myself, desperate to feel anything at all. I’d spotted him across the crowded pub where I was trying to drown everything in enough liquor to take down a much larger man.
He was handsome, yes, but more than that, he was different. Thick, messy red hair instead of long, flowing white strands. Broad shoulders and a solid neck rather than willowy, graceful limbs. Piercing honey-brown eyes instead of cloudy, serene white.
I’d stumbled over, dropped myself into his lap without invitation, and kissed him with a ferocity that screamed I was running from demons I couldn’t outpace.
He’d let me run for a while, leading me upstairs to an empty room and crashing onto the bed with me.
I was a drunk, feral thing, clawing at his skin and clothes in a frantic attempt to forget.
But he’d pulled back, concern replacing the heat in his eyes as his thumb brushed away the tears streaking my cheeks.
At first, I was angry he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, but once the anger faded, all that remained was my broken heart. I’d cried until there was nothing left, and despite being a complete stranger, he’d held me through the night while I soaked his shirt with endless tears.
We’ve been inseparable ever since. He’s the closest thing to family I have now. A brother who never tolerates my lies or bullshit when he sees through them.
I hesitate before meeting his eyes again. There’s been no romantic spark between us since that first night, but his words linger.
“I’m not… using you,” I say at last, sighing when he arches a brow at the weak argument. “Fuck. Okay, yeah, that was using you, and it was shitty of me. You aren’t…”
I trail off, searching his expression. “There’s no… like that… between us, right?”
Cato snorts a laugh and shoves me away, making me scowl as I rub my chin. “Don’t flatter yourself. Things might’ve gone differently if we’d met under other circumstances, but you made your stance clear from day one.”
“My stance?”
He rolls his eyes and flops onto the couch with a heavy sigh.
“You were always in love with his memory. You might’ve pretended otherwise all these years, but don’t think I haven’t noticed the type you cozy up to at the bar.
Tall, thin… long blond hair. A little coy mixed with a whole lot of cocky.
You’ve been chasing his ghost, man. That shit isn’t healthy. ”
Heat floods my cheeks as I glance away, staring at the floor. “Yeah, I know it isn’t.”
“And now it’s caught up with you,” Cato says, stern but not unkind. “You can’t ignore him when he’s sitting a hundred feet away. What are you going to do with him?”
I groan and recline in my chair, scrubbing my hands over my face. “Act like this never happened? Go back to pretending he’s dead?”
“You don’t want that,” Cato says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle.
“Let me live in my delusions, man. At least then I could keep believing he never came back because he couldn’t. Maybe he was locked away somewhere, or maybe he’d been searching for me the whole time. It was such a pretty picture in my head.”
“That’s an entire damn ocean of denial,” Cato says in his token judginess, lips pursed.
“So let me drown in it,” I say, peeking between my fingers at him. “It’s a hell of a lot easier than the truth.”
“The truth came knocking at your front door,” he counters. “You don’t really have a choice but to believe it anymore.”
I drop my hands and pull a face at him, but he only raises a brow and waits as we fall into a heavy, contemplative silence.
“Did he say what he wants?” I ask after a long stretch.
Cato shakes his head. “Only that there’s more to the story he needs to share with you.”
The way I’m split in half is frustratingly peculiar. My body and mind are divided by a fracture running straight through the center of me, each side at war with the other.
One part wants to run and hide, to burrow deep into the shadows and pretend none of this happened.
But it’s the other part that terrifies me most.
It wants to charge into that room and demand every answer he owes me.
Force the truth from his lips with my bare hands if I have to, and simply exist in that same space again.
Listen to the familiar timbre of his voice, bury my face in his chest, inhale that scent that once meant safety and home, and let the weight of his arms ground me the way they did when the world felt conquerable.
Find the missing piece of myself that he never gave back.
My legs itch to run to him, to fall at his feet and shed every ounce of pride like dead skin. Beg him to lie, to just fucking lie, and tell me he still loves me in that same breathless, all-consuming way I never stopped loving him, even when it carved me hollow.
I want to scream and fight and fuck until we’re both in pieces.
To rip his heart out and curse his name, to hurt him until he understands what it feels like to be irreparably broken.
Maybe then our jagged edges could fit together again. Maybe then, sliced open and gutted, we could form something whole.
It’s such a beautiful, impossible lie.
“Can you take care of it?” I ask, hating how small my voice sounds.
Cato tilts his head, reading me too easily. “You’re going to have to face this sooner or later, you know.”
“Says who?”
He fixes me with a heavy stare. “Unless you want me to dump him outside the gates and tell him never to come back… and trust me, nothing would make me happier.”
Pain lances through my chest at the thought, and an immediate protest rises on my tongue that I’m barely able to swallow.
Cato sighs. “He has information we might need. It’d be careless not to hear him out. I’ll see what I can get from him, but be prepared. Something tells me he might not talk to me.”
I picture the stubborn set of Xeni’s jaw whenever he was pushed into something he didn’t want, and despite everything, a bittersweet smile tugs at my lips.
“Yeah,” I agree, “probably not.”
He watches me closely. “You okay? Truly?”
I want to say yes, to ease the worry in his eyes, but I only manage to shrug. His hand lands on my shoulder with a reassuring squeeze.
We don’t make false promises or sugarcoat truths. There’s just the quiet understanding that he’s here if I need him.
“Thanks,” I whisper.
He gives my shoulder one last squeeze before heading for the door.