I slip the mask over my eyes, hoping in vain that it will hide my heartbreak from everyone I pass.
Knowing it will hurt too much, I don’t give the room a backward glance before heading to the back door.
Every step I take away from them has the cracks in my chest growing, but it’s when I slide into the back of a taxi that the agony engulfs me.
Just like every time before, I’m alone again.
The way I’m meant to be.
The way I deserve.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ASHER
“Fuck!”
Everything was going so well. So perfectly. Until it wasn’t.
The door is slow to close, a design to ensure it shuts without a sound, but each inch it comes closer to clicking into place adds to the distance between Hannah and me.
My sweet Hannah.
The heart I didn’t know I had. Didn’t know I needed.
“She just needs time,” Rowan clamps his hand on my shoulder the same way he has my whole life. The man has many flaws, but none of them extend to his parenting skills.
All the shady shit he’s done, that he’s dragged me into, may make him seem like a shitty parent, but I wouldn’t have him any other way.
“We don’t have time,” I growl.
Our need to keep her safe has already brought forward the timeline. When you deal in illegal betting and fights, you’re bound to make some enemies, and ours have caught wind of our obsession.
Not to mention Jeffrey fucking Malone.
That man made my skin crawl the first time I met him, and I have no clue how Hannah survived her entire childhood in the same house as him.
Not that she had a choice.
We may be criminals, and I may have made a living for close to a decade by beating the shit out of people in front of the whole world, but we look like angels next to Hannah’s grandfather.
Which is really saying something.
Hiding behind generational wealth, a mansion that rivals Buckingham Palace, and a reputation so squeaky clean it’s suspicious, is one of the worst humans I’ve ever had the misfortune of crossing paths with.
Rowan has done everything in his power to protect Hannah these past five years, but Jeffrey has started the process of finding his granddaughter a suitable husband, and I highly fucking doubt her ex-stepfather or his son are going to make the list.
“We have contingency plans,” he reminds me.
“Kidnapping her is not a contingency plan,” I snap.
“But it might be our only option.”
“She’s had her choices taken from her for her whole life. She won’t forgive us if we have to take that step.”
He sighs, rubbing a hand down his face. The man reigns over the family business without blinking an eye, but the idea of losing Hannah before we can ever really have her is what keeps him up at night. “She’ll understand. Eventually.”
I tug my shirt on and secure my belt before turning to the door. “I’m going to make sure she gets home okay.”
