Chapter 17 #2
He shimmied his shoulders, squatting up and down on the spot in a terrible imitation of me.
I’d jumped around with much more energy and finesse than that.
Yet I stood dumbfounded, watching this beast of a man mimic my movements.
I was struck by how young he seemed all of a sudden.
This guy had killed people, viciously and without cause if his hardened reputation was to be believed.
And yet here he was laughing with me and acting a fool over a bike ride.
“What’s that look for?” he asked, stilling.
I shook my head, unable to tear my gaze away from him. “You’re just…”
He quirked a brow, a defensive move that was clearly a reflex.
“… not what I expected.”
He shrugged. “I could say the same about you.”
I nodded wordlessly, too confused to respond, when he pocketed the keys to the bike and took my hand.
He towed me down a short path to a bench seat overlooking the beach.
The sun was almost gone now, hitting the horizon in the distance with an orange glow.
There were a handful of people walking on the sand below us, the waves cascading against the beach in a gentle rhythm.
We took a seat, sitting shoulder to shoulder and staring out at the water.
“Why did you agree to this?” Boston asked into the silence.
I glanced at him. “Agree to what? The ride or our marriage?”
He let out what sounded like a humorless laugh. “You didn’t agree to the marriage. Neither of us did.”
My eyes widened slightly in surprise at the notion that this marriage was against his will, the same as it was mine. Surely one of us had to have been in attendance to make it legal?
I wanted to ask, but I also didn’t want to open that door and all the inevitable questions and conversations that would have to happen as a result.
It was so much easier to shut him out. To refuse to believe the marriage was reality, or that there was a world where he and I could ever share any kind of connection.
He shifted his boots in the sand beneath us. “I meant the ride.”
It was an easy out for both of us. Avoid the hard stuff and start with something simpler.
“You were there. You asked.”
It was a terrible answer. An absolute cop out. But I didn’t know the real answer. Or at least, didn’t want to examine it too closely or it might involve admitting things to myself that I wasn’t willing to face right now.
I’d only just come to terms with my feelings for Pres, Sin, and Dacre.
I couldn’t reconcile whatever it was I might or might not be feeling for Boston.
I’d just been on a bike for the first time in my life, for all I knew the swooping of my stomach when he’d tapped my hand, or the tingling between my legs when he’d rubbed my thigh were standard reactions to the adrenalin-induced experience.
“I’ve been hanging around for weeks. You’ve run from me every time. What was different today?”
The way he said it, his tone. It was almost vulnerable. Like he was looking for something only I could offer him.
I shifted in my seat, staring out at the water.
“I’m so tired of fighting against everything in my life.
I did it in my old life with my father. I did it for so long with the Astons.
I just don’t have the energy to fight anymore.
” I sighed, resigned to admitting what I really didn’t want to.
“And I realized after what you did for me with Trenton that maybe there is more to you than your reputation and the things I’d heard about you. ”
I felt his gaze on me and glanced in his direction, his dark brown eyes pinning me to the spot.
“Whatever you think about me, whatever your father’s told you… not all of it is true.”
I stared back at him, part of me desperate to believe him, because then I wasn’t married to a complete monster.
But part of me hated the idea that he might be a decent guy and his reputation was built on a lie, because then I had no armor against him.
I had no reason to push him away, other than to spite my father.
And while that idea possessed permanent and life-long appeal, staring at Boston now as he sat beside me, and after the ride we’d just shared together, pushing him away had just become much harder.
I cleared my throat, turning away from him. “It’s not just what he’s told me. It’s what the world says about you.”
His expression tightened and he turned back to the beach. “How about we start with what the world told me about you? We’ll see if that’s true. And if it’s not, then maybe you’ll see that we might not be able to believe what we think we know about each other.”
I nodded wordlessly, stomach filling with a mix of expectation and dread at what he might think of me based on my life in Seattle that was controlled by my father.
He hesitated, clearly choosing his words carefully. “When my father first told me about our arrangement, I barely knew who you were. So I…” He stopped. “I asked around about you.”
I shifted in my seat, biting the inside of my cheek.
“Your reputation is that you are your father’s pawn.
That he’d tried to use you as a bargaining piece in so many of his deals before he finally struck one with my father.
But too many men in our father’s world believed you to be weak and submissive, and that you didn’t have the backbone to make it as a mobster’s wife. ”
I nodded ruefully, a part of me pissed off that was my reputation.
The other part of me accepting where it came from.
Because I’d been scared all the time in my old life.
My personality had died, my free will had been eviscerated, and I walked around like an empty shell too afraid to move in case it set my father off.
“Even from the few interactions we’ve had,” Boston said. “I know already that’s not who you are.”
I stared down at my hands. “It’s not who I am. Not even close, but it was definitely a part of who I used to be.”
We sat in silence for a moment, both of us staring out over the water contemplating how we’d found ourselves here.
“I don’t know all that much about you either,” I said. “Not really. Only the public stuff.”
Boston shifted on the seat beside me. “Oh yeah? And what stuff is that?”
I cringed internally, not wanting to lay it all out in front of him but knowing I had to if I wanted clarity.
“That you’re violent. You kill people. You’re a brutal hitman for your father.”
He was quiet, his feet shifting in the sand beneath the bench, both of us tracking the movement.
“All of that is true.”
I nodded silently, not sure how to respond to that kind of confirmation.
“Though some days I really wish it wasn’t.”
He stared out of the water again, the wind picking up and blowing my hair around my face.
“But I can’t go back and erase the past, no matter how much I want to. And I don’t know if I can ever truly escape it either.”
I turned my head to assess him, the words he’d just echoed inside me, touching a part of my soul because it was exactly how I felt about my life in Seattle.
I wish I could erase it so those years weren’t a part of me anymore.
Boston being here in Cape Canyon was bringing up parts of my past I couldn’t escape.
My old life had followed me into the new one and I couldn’t get away from it no matter how hard I tried.
“Can I ask you something? Something serious…” I said, shifting towards him.
I wanted answers and now was the time to get them, but that didn’t mean my stomach wasn’t twisting painfully at the idea of saying it out loud.
“Did you really behead a man who broke into your family home?”
He let out a rueful huff, sitting up straighter. “I didn’t behead him.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I stabbed him in the neck.”
My head reared back, eyes going wide. The way he said it so matter of fact, there was something slightly terrifying about it.
“You…” I paused, stunned. “Why?”
He shot me a sideways glance. “Most people wouldn’t bother asking. They’d take the knowledge that I was a violent thug and move on.”
“You said maybe we can’t believe what the world thinks about us. I want to know if that’s true. So why did you…” I trailed off.
“Stab him in the neck?”
I cringed, nodding.
“He wasn’t a random thief who broke into my family’s compound. He was my sister’s husband.”
That statement was more confusing than ever. “You stabbed your sister’s husband?”
“He was violent. My father knew that about him when he married my sister off to him and didn’t care.
But he beat her every single day and over the stupidest things.
She didn’t fold his laundry the right way.
She cooked food with cilantro and he didn’t like it.
She left her makeup on the bathroom counter.
He found any reason he could to beat the hell out of her. ”
The anger building in him was palpable, I could feel it rolling off him.
“She’d confided in me and I told her to come home. Begged her to do it for weeks.” He rubbed his hands on his thighs over his riding leathers. “Eventually she got up the courage to do it and came back to us, but her husband wouldn’t let her go.”
He shook his head at the memory.
“I told my father that she wasn’t going back to him, and I’d kill him before I let him send my sister back to that asshole. She was under my protection now. He relented, but her husband didn’t. He snuck into our family’s home and dragged my sister down the stairs by her hair.”
A gasp escaped me, my hand covering my mouth.
“I came home to the sound of her screaming as he hauled her across the foyer by her hair. I’ll never forget it. I still hear it sometimes when I sleep.”
He’d admitted to killing people for his father.
Hell, he’d admitted to killing his sister’s husband so I knew how this story was going to end.
And yet saying he was haunted by his sister’s screams weren’t the words I expected to hear from a brutal enforcer.
They were the words of a guy tortured by his world.