“She wasn’t yours to protect that way.”
“She was when no one else was doing it for her.”
“I would have?—”
“Bullshit!” I cut him off, sharper now. I refused to give him the space to control this.
His expression darkened instantly.
“And then they would have made you watch.” Unable to hold back, I spoke another truth. “And then I would’ve lost both of you.”
We shouldn’t be here.
This shouldn’t be happening.
Those were the two thoughts that kept resurfacing through everything we were spewing at each other. All the shoutingand the tension weren’t just another argument or two people disagreeing. This was much deeper—something we’d been holding in for far too long.
“Please stop,” she expressed in a sad, desolate tone.
We didn’t pay her any mind. We were too consumed with one-upping each other that nothing else existed.
Not even her.
Julius scoffed out a snide chuckle, laced with frustration and guilt. “So calling the cops on me was your only option? You couldn’t have come to me first?”
“It wouldn’t have made it right, what you were doing.”
“No…” I spoke with conviction. “It made it necessary.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
JULIUS
“You’re my brother,”Kraven continued. “I love you.” His voice was rougher now, less controlled, like this was the part that actually mattered to him.
I stared at him, trying to reconcile that with everything he did. “You don’t get to say that like it fixes anything.” I stepped back, needing space. I broke his chain before it strangled me. “You can’t say you’re my brother and you love me and then choose her over me in the same breath.”
His eyes flashed. “You think I chose her over you?”
“You did,” I replied without hesitation.
“No,” he corrected, stepping forward again, closing the space I tried to create. “I chose to make sure she wasn’t the one paying for something she had nothing to do with or knew nothing about.”
“That’s not your call.”
“It became my call the second I realized what you were doing.”
“You should have come to me first. That’s what brothers do, that’s what family does. You don’t know the meaning of the word loyalty.”
“And waste time we didn’t have?” He shook his head. “No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
“You always think you know enough.”
