Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Something had to change.
There was being stubborn, and then there was being stupid, and Dragon knew he had firmly crossed over into the second.
If Rose could forgive Steel after what they’d all done to her and still want to be with him, there had to be a chance that Cassandra could forgive him for shutting her out.
All he had to do was pray that she understood that revenge had been all he’d been thinking about from the time he was old enough to understand what it was and what his family was trying to turn him into.
Revenge against his mafia bloodline might not be in the cards, but once they got Dr. Ridge Gardner’s name, making the man suffer for everything he’d put him and his team through had been all-consuming.
Ignoring Cassandra when she was trying to get in the way of a revenge she could never truly understand the scope of had seemed like the only logical thing to do.
But Cassandra had been right.
Using Rose was wrong. It didn't help them get one step closer to revenge, instead it brought them one step closer to becoming the monsters Dr. Gardner had intended them to be.
Listening to Cassandra, taking that step back to examine what they were doing rather than just jumping straight in, would have saved Rose, who had already suffered so much, from being hurt all over again.
Just because things had turned out okay, that Rose had fallen for Steel, who was utterly obsessed with the redhead, didn't make what they’d done any less wrong.
It was only the fact that Rose had proven to be immune to the effects of torture that had stopped his team from going any further.
Despite Steel and the others wanting to back off from her, he had been the one still insistent on continuing, insistent on killing her once she lost any perceived usefulness.
Now he had to make things right before he stood even a chance at earning Cassandra’s forgiveness.
Finding which room Rose was in was easy.
With the number of rooms in the mansion, they’d all managed to carve out their own spaces.
After spending three years locked in a reinforced glass cage together, with their every move watched and not a single second to themselves, it was no wonder that now they all craved a place to call their own.
While they had some shared spaces, the main office where they planned ops, the kitchen and dining room, one of the living rooms, and the gym, the rest of the spaces were their own personal ones.
When he found Rose in the smaller office, she was sitting at the desk, a furrow in her brow as she concentrated on the piece of paper she held in her hands.
None of them had known until recently that Steel had a thing for origami, something he’d learned how to do from his grandmother.
He’d shared the interest with Rose, and now she was obsessed, working on perfecting her technique and learning new objects to fold and make like it was her lifeline.
Not even having one of her arms in a cast stopped her.
“You going to stand there staring at me or are you interrupting me for a reason?” she finally asked without looking up from what she was doing.
Guess Steel’s little ladybug was more aware of her surroundings than he’d realized.
Not that he should be surprised. He and his team had chosen the lives they’d been handed, even if they hadn't had all the intel they needed to make an informed decision, but Rose had been forced to learn survival skills, or she never would have made it through being raised by her brother.
Entering the room, he moved to stand by the window, staring out at the forest surrounding the mansion.
It was peaceful out there, it was one of the things he loved most about this remote retreat Eagle had found and created for them.
There were no neighbors for miles, nothing out there but trees and wildlife.
It was the only place he’d ever lived that felt like a home.
Maybe that wasn't due entirely to the location of the Gothic mansion, and also included the fact that the men he lived with felt like family.
They were his family as far as he was concerned.
And now his family had grown to include the woman watching him with dark green eyes that saw too much.
“Do I need to worry that you rethought your plan to kill me?” Rose finally asked, and he spun around to glare at her.
“You know I'm not a threat to you,” he growled.
Rose just grinned. “Maybe. I also know asking that question is the best way to get you talking. What's up, Dragon? Why did you track me down when I'm not the woman you really want to be talking to?”
“Actually, you were exactly the woman I needed to talk to.”
“Well, since Steel would rip your tongue out if that were true, and I think Cassandra would help, I don’t think I'm where you want to be right now. Where you need to be.”
“I need to apologize to you,” he blurted out. The words felt weird on his tongue because he’d been raised to never apologize for his behavior. The head of a mafia family didn't waste time saying sorry to people who were below them.
“I should say you do,” Rose agreed cheerfully. “Abducting me, torturing me, wanting to keep going to try to make me break, deciding killing me was better than letting me go. If anyone was ever owed the apology of all apologies, it’s definitely me.”
Her gentle teasing, making light of a situation he knew had caused her pain, helped him relax a little.
“I'm sorry, Rose. Truly. We all should have known better than to give in to the anger inside us and go after an innocent person. I don’t know how you're even able to look at any one of us, let alone do … the stuff I smell you doing with Steel.”
Rose laughed before sobering. “I'm not saying I’ll ever one hundred percent get over what you all did to me,” Rose said, her voice growing serious.
“You gave me new scars when I already had so many, you tried to take my power over myself like my brother had been doing my entire life.
But I'd be lying if I said I couldn’t understand why you did it.
I guess that helps me to put it in perspective, put myself in your shoes, and see things the way you did.
Steel was the first person to offer me true freedom, a chance to find out who I really am when I'm not fighting against being what someone else wanted me to be.”
“Yet you chose to stay here with us when given a choice of freedom.”
“Sometimes being free doesn’t mean being alone. If I'd left, I'd be right back where I was before, all alone in the world, trying to figure things out on my own. But here I have Steel. He’s crazy, and obsessive, way too overprotective, but …”
“You're falling in love with him,” he finished for her, and she nodded.
“It’s the craziest thing. I know how it looks to anyone else, but what I feel for him is real, and it’s terrifying.
Feelings weren't part of my childhood, and when I got away from Ridge, I thought that developing them for anyone was a weakness, something that could be used against me, but I was wrong.
Feelings aren't a weakness, they're a strength.
I've never felt stronger than I do knowing I have Steel at my back. The rest of you are starting to feel like brothers, and I finally feel like I belong somewhere.”
So much of what Rose had just said resonated with him in a way he wasn't sure anyone else could have affected him.
Their childhoods had been similar in so many ways, and he, too, felt like he didn't know who he was, and that allowing himself to feel anything for anyone else was a weakness that could get someone hurt.
“Cassandra’s back, I don’t know the details of what went on between you two other than she left over what you all had planned for me, but the details don’t matter right now.
All that matters is what you want the future to look like.
I was able to forgive Steel because I made the choice to look forward instead of backward.
It doesn’t fix what's behind you, or make it disappear, but it makes it easier to keep moving on, and one day maybe the past will be so far behind me I can't even see it clearly anymore.”
That was what he wanted. To move far enough away from the past that it could no longer keep its claws in him. Dragon wanted to find his own freedom, wanted to know who he was, who he wanted to be, and he wanted Cassandra to be part of that future.
If it wasn't already too late to make that happen.
January 6th
3:37 P.M.
The house was different than it had been last time Cassandra stayed there.
There was life in it now.
Which sounded weird because when she’d stayed last year, the thing she’d enjoyed the most was that the guys often kept to themselves and everything was so peaceful.
That tranquility had been shattered when more of her family moved out there, but the craziness had all come from her family, on the whole, the guys still kept to themselves.
But not so much anymore.
Something had obviously shifted when Rose moved in. Although the rooms were all set up the same way, and she assumed the guys all retreated to their personal spaces when they needed them, there was a connection between them that had been missing before.
These men would kill for one another, she had no doubt about that, never had. They were family in every way that mattered. But they also needed their space, and unless training together or working on something in their office, they were usually on their own.
When she’d woken up a couple of hours ago, unable to get much sleep even though she was exhausted, she’d come down to the kitchen expecting to find it empty. Instead, it had been bursting at the seams. All six of the guys were there along with Rose, and there’d been chatter and laughter.
Neither had been there last time.