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“Yeah.”
His expression changes because he was the one who walked the grounds with me after Lance’s arrest. He saw the blood in my mouth, listened while I lost my shit over my mother, and told me nobody blamed me for what happened. He also warned me not to let Charm turn any of it back on me.
“What happened when you went to her?” Easton asks.
“I told her to walk with me.”
“And?” Rider prompts when I stop.
“She folded her arms and asked whether she was allowed.”
Briggs’s jaw tightens. “After everything that happened on the terrace?”
“She was angry because I told her to stay out of the fight.”
Cade lowers the bottle. “You went to her bleeding and asked her to come with you.”
“I’m aware.”
“What did she say?”
I drain half the whiskey before answering. “She told me to fuck off pretty much.”
Nobody speaks.
The fire cracks across the lawn while laughter moves through the people surrounding it. Charm remains inside the center of that warmth with my jacket around her and her face turned toward Bliss.
Cade’s voice lowers. “I told you not to let her turn it on you.”
“I didn’t. I walked away.”
“Then she came to your room,” Easton says.
“While I was in bed trying to get drunk enough to sleep.”
Briggs looks toward Charm. “Did she apologize?”
“Eventually.”
His attention returns to me. “What happened first?”
“She came in already furious because nobody told her what Lance did in Milwaukee. She found out about the investigation, the meetings and the photographs all at once. Everyone she trusted knew some part of it while she ran around this castle believing she understood what she was trying to repair. Then I dropped the bomb on Lance that Crystal was leaving him. She lost it, she didn’t know.”
“That would fuck anyone up,” Rider says.
“I know it would.”
I stare into the bourbon while the night reassembles itself in pieces I have spent all day trying to keep separated.
So, I tell them everything.
Once I start, I don’t stop. I tell them how Charm dismissed what I needed after Lance’s attack, then came to my room demanding every piece of the life I had kept from her. I give them the entire ugly shape of the fight: the truths she forced out of me, what she finally admitted about the study, and how knowingly she had used my love to survive the parts of herself she refused to face.
I tell them about the mirror too.
That part belongs to Charm and me in a way nothing else ever will, but removing it would also remove the reason I’m standing here asking four men for advice about whether I can survive loving her again. I don’t give them details designed to entertain them, and none of them would disrespect her by asking. They hear enough to understand that she trusted me with the body she nearly destroyed, remained in front of her reflection when every instinct told her to hide, and saw herself through something other than hatred for one fragile moment.
I even tell them about the sex because pretending it was only sex would be another lie. It was angry, desperate, intimate, and so full of everything we still feel that I asked her to stay afterward. I needed her beside me, and I took whatever comfort her body and trust could give after the rest of the night had left me with nothing.
