Especially after everything that had happened lately with the funeral and my sisters and my dad. Maybe if my sister hadn’t kicked me out of her place, or these wounds from my dad hadn’t been reopened, or if my cousin hadn’t just shown up to my work to try and hurt me… Maybe I could have let it go if all those things hadn’t existed so recently. If they hadn’t rubbed me raw as much as they already had.
Now this? From him of all people?
I didn’t like being threatened, especially not today.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked him cautiously, fear pooling in my stomach as I tried to think about him having things to say that would intentionally hurt me.
“Drop it.”
Drop it? There was something to drop? My heart started beating faster, and that survival instinct told me to let it go. Told me this wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t.I couldn’t.“What’s that supposed to mean?” I repeated myself. “What would you say to me that would hurt my feelings?”
The face he made… the face he made warned me. It was the only preface I was going to get before he aimed blue-green eyes at me like they had fire in them.
“Tell me,” I kept going even though some part of me knew I didn’t want to know.
“Stop.”
I couldn’t though.I couldn’t.Not today. Not after this life I’d been living for so long where it seemed like half my loved ones didn’t trust me or didn’t value me enough. I didn’t want to take it from one other person I was so invested in. I didn’t want Rip to be on that list. Was that so wrong? “I want to know. I don’t want you to tiptoe around me because you think I’m weak or pathetic. I’m not. I’m not either. I want you totellme.”
His expression alone might have killed me. “Yeah? That’s what you want?” he asked, something about his tone almost cruel. “I’ve known what you fucking did to your family from the day we went to the funeral, Luna. It’s not some fucking secret. I knew. Everyone fucking knew, Jesus Christ.”
Don’t you let him see you flinch.
But he wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t freaking done. “You wanna know how I knew? You wanna know the truth? I didn’t read about the bust in the paper. I knew about it because thatgangyou asked me if I was in wasn’t agang. I was in an MC. A motorcycle club. The Reapers. And we didn’t fuck with your family’s drugs, but I’d met your uncle. I’d met your dad. I heard all about the girl that got half the family arrested. I knew about you before I met you.”
Some rational part of my brain tried to tell the rest of it that what he was saying wasn’t a big deal. That it didn’t change anything. That it didn’t mean anything.
I wasn’t embarrassed by it. I didn’t feel bad about it.
But…
“Cooper’s known the entire time too, so you know. He told me years ago that he’d hired a PI to look into you, and he’s always known where you came from and who your family was.”
He’d known too. For who knows how long, maybe from the beginning, he had known.
And he’d never said a word.
I could understand keeping his first wife a secret. Maybe, I could even understand him keeping Rip a secret if I really wanted to be logical. But he’d known about my background and never said anything? Not in nine years?
“Is that good enough? Will you go now and give me a fucking break, or do I need to spell it out for you?Leave me alone.”
Leave me alone, my sister had projected at me wordlessly countless times.
Leave me alone, my dad had hissed at me countless more.
Leave me alone.
I could have held a whole lot of anger in my heart. When people like Thea or Kyra made me upset, there were a million things I could have thought of to hurt them, but I never would. Because I would never want anyone I loved to hurt because of me. I would go out of my way to make sure that didn’t happen.
Yet…
I froze. I blinked, and I swallowed as I said, almost woodenly, attempting to ignore the familiarity of what had come out of his mouth, “I’m only trying to be your friend.”
“Does it look like I give a fuck about that right now?”
I had gotten real good at getting crapped on by people. By being taken advantage of.
But not from people who I thought I could trust. Who had made me believe that I could. Yet here I was.
