CHAPTER NINETEEN DAMON
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DAMON
NOW
That motherfucker.
I should have known he would go to her the second I turned my back, but I had hoped he wasn’t that stupid.
Unfortunately for me, it seems I got all the brains in the sibling department.
I thought about following him, but the last thing we need is to start more drama around the Syndicate. Once Chloe inevitably leaves New York, thinking it will keep her safe, we can grab her, but until then it’s unwise to start a war with anyone as well connected as them.
Despite being one of the oldest mafia families in the country, their connections extend further than ours do, and that’s not something I need to deal with when I’m so close to becoming the head of the family.
I should have taken over for my father years ago, but he’s too stubborn to accept that anyone other than him can succeed in the role.
It doesn’t help that my marriage never went ahead and one of the conditions of my succession was to have a wife, but new leadership is what the family needs right now, and that’s something he’s starting to accept.
I check my phone, once again finding that Ronan hasn’t replied to my thirteen phone calls or any of the texts I’ve sent since I woke up and found him gone.
Chloe fucking Weaver is back in our life for twelve hours, and he’s already breaking rules for her. Why am I not surprised?
The door to our suite swings open, and my brother walks in, dropping his phone and wallet on the side table before glaring at me through a very black eye that he didn’t have when I fell asleep.
“What happened to you?”
“Chloe,” he rumbles.
A choked laugh escapes my throat. “You’re kidding, right? You didn’t actually let her get the jump on you.”
“She head butted me,” he replies, stalking toward me with anger vibrating through his body. “She had a very different account of what happened in the days before she left than you or Dad have told me.”
I force my face to remain impassive. “I’m sure she did. But she’s a liar, so that’s hardly a surprise.”
He steps closer until we’re toe to toe. “Really? So you didn’t watch as our father and his men hurt my pregnant girlfriend to make her father talk?”
I don’t react. I can’t. Because there are a lot of things from that weekend that I can never tell him.
I kept it from him as much to protect him as I did to protect the family, and the last thing we need is internal conflict at the same time as an old threat reenters our lives.
Chloe may not be much of a threat to us physically—Ronan’s black eye aside—but she grew up in a mafia family the same way we did, and she knows exactly how to take us down.
“What makes you think you can believe a word she says?” I challenge.
“Because she was fucking destroyed, Damon.”
“You haven’t seen her in a decade, brother,” I remind him. “You don’t know her like you did when you were kids. And even then you couldn’t trust her.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he growls. His hand comes up faster than I expect, wrapping around my throat and shoving me against the wall.
The air leaves my lungs with the hit, and if I weren't so pissed, I would probably be impressed. He stopped challenging me the second our father stopped demanding it, but it seems the little liar still holds his balls in her hands, even after all these years.
“She left because she wanted to, not because she was scared for her life.” The lie is bitter on my tongue, but it’s for the best. The truth would ruin him, and I can’t afford to lose my number two before I have the chance to take the throne.
“She’s a manipulative liar, and you’re being sucked right back into her web. ”
He tugs me away from the wall just to slam me back against it, sending pain shooting through my back and shoulders.
Shit. He’s not holding back.
“You don’t think I know when I’m being lied to?
” he snarls. “I fucking knew there was something you and Dad weren’t telling me.
I just didn’t know everything you told me was a fucking lie.
You even fucking told me at the time that she didn’t leave because she wanted to!
You don’t get to change your story whenever it’s convenient. ”
He shoves me again before stalking across the room, his fists flexing over and over again.
It takes a lot to wind up Ronan. Where I’ve always had a short fuse, he got all the patience. In school, I got into so many fights my fists were scarred well before I ever did my first job for the family, but my brother was always calm, usually favoring a peaceful solution over violence.
That’s probably why he struggled so much initially stepping into the family business, but Dad beat that out of him.
I knew I was going to regret telling him that, but seeing him so fucking broken did shit to my rational mind. I thought feeding him something would help him move on.
“You can’t believe everything she told you, man.” I step toward him but pause when he turns on me, pure rage staring back at me. Fuck. He looks like he could kill me right now and not blink an eye, and honestly, I’d probably deserve it.
Because I did lie to him, but I did it for his own good. If he knew what happened that weekend, he’d have killed our father and started a civil war within the family that we wouldn’t have won. It was better this way, even if he can’t see that through his rage.
“I believe her a hell of a lot more than I do you right now.”
I sigh, running a hand over my face and through my hair. I haven’t been awake long enough to be dealing with this shit, and until I officially take over the family, I have to be very fucking careful what I tell him.
Once I’m sitting on the throne, he can have the truth, but until then I have to keep up the lie our father told him.
“She’s manipulating you, Ronan. She knows she can appeal to your love for her, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. But she took your child away before you even knew she was pregnant. Someone who loves you wouldn’t have done that.”
“She lost the baby,” he snaps, and my stomach rolls, images of the night she fled flashing in my mind. “The torture and trauma she sustained, that I never even knew about, meant her body couldn’t handle the pregnancy.”
I fight to keep my face passive, but when his eyes turn even more murderous than they were a few seconds ago, I realize I didn’t do a very good job.
“You let him torture her?” He advances on me, and this time I don’t step back because I deserve his wrath.
I deserve death for what I allowed to happen to Chloe Weaver.
I may have spent the last decade convincing myself she was this terrible person who broke my brother’s heart, but the reality is she was a scared girl who took the only chance she had at survival.
I’ve often asked Dad what the plan was if she’d died alongside her parents, how he would have spun that to Ronan, but if there’s one thing to be said about Salvatore Lombardi, it’s that he doesn’t play with “what-ifs.”
His fist comes out of nowhere, and I don’t get a chance to block him before it’s too late. Pain radiates across my cheek and eye, tearing a grunt from my chest.
Fuck that hurt.
When did he get such a good right hook?
“Did that make you feel better?” I deadpan.
Another fist flies toward me, but I manage to duck out of the way before it can connect.
“You get one free shot, brother. The next time you take a swing at me, you’ll regret it.”
“You’re lucky I haven’t killed you,” he growls.
“Really? Your own brother? For what? A whore you haven’t seen in a decade? A woman who never took the time to let you know she was alive?”
“Don’t call her that,” he grinds out.
I shouldn’t keep pushing him. He’s already too wound up, and yet I don’t stop. The words keep coming even as my mind screams at me to shut up.
“It’s true, brother. You know as well as I do how badly she wanted to fuck me. Didn’t I ever tell you about the night of my engagement party? She wanted me so fucking badly because someone else was going to have me.”
“You’re a liar.” He shoves me back, but there’s a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
“I’m not lying, Ronan. You can ask her if you want. If you’re as good at reading her as you think you are, you’ll see the truth.”
I don’t give him a chance to reply before I’m stalking toward the door.
If we stay locked up in this suite together for another moment we’re going to kill each other, and somehow I don’t think I could explain murdering my brother to our father.
And besides, it’s time Chloe and I had a little chat about the past.