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, tryingto 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.
The guys talked, sure, they weren't mute or anything. But they used to only talk when necessary, and there was never any laughter. Today, however, they’d been talking with Rose about vegetable gardens she wanted to plant in the expanse of lawn between the mansion and the forest.
Cassandra had overheard Rose mentioning how it would be nice to do something to the space out back, and Blade had piped up about how they should put the vegetable gardens out front as a memorial to Rose’s escape attempt.
