As Wylder gazed back at me, something fell away in his expression. For a second, he looked almost haunted. I hesitated, expecting the rare show of emotion to vanish behind his walls as quickly as it emerged, but he didn’t shake it off. He glanced at the floor and then back at me. “No matter what I say to you or how I treat you, you’re not going to leave, are you?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “You only just figured that out?”
“No. Well—I don’t know.” He lowered himself into his own chair, looking so conflicted that my heart tugged to go to him despite everything. “I’m sorry. You have earned that trust, more than earned it. I just—I was trying to protect you.”
The great Wylder Noble was apologizing to me? I was stunned, but not so much that I couldn’t sputter a laugh at the last thing he’d said. “By treating me like dirt not even worthy of sticking to the soles of your shoes? Like I was a fucking piece of tissue you jerked off into and then wanted to toss in the trash?”
He actually winced. My voice might have come out pretty harsh. I’d told myself I didn’t care, but I was angry about a whole lot of things from the past several days here, and it was all bubbling to the surface.
“I know it sounds stupid,” he said. “But I didn’t feel like I had a whole lot of choice.”
“Of course you did. You had a choice not to be an asshole to me. You had a choice to let me in on the missions without fighting me every step of the way. You just didn’t make those choices.”
“Not because I don’t trust you,” he insisted. “Because I don’t trust my dad. I didn’t want to treat you like that, but I thought if I could just come down on you hard enough to force you to go before he could do even worse… I know it sounds awful, but you have no idea how far he’ll go to hurt you—or me.”
Hurt him? I found myself staring again and forced myself to sit back down. “I don’t understand.”
Wylder considered what was left of his brandy. Then he tossed it all down like a shot. He set the glass on a side table hard and frowned at the wall.
“When I was fifteen, I started hooking up with a girl from school. Laurel. She was… sweet and bubbly and totally separate from everything here. When I was with her, all the violence and the expectations didn’t seem to matter that much. It became more than just hooking up. I fell for her. I was seeing her more and more—and then Dad found out.”
A lump formed at the bottom of my throat. I knew how this kind of story ended. Rowan had told me one version of it yesterday.
“What did he do?” I asked. My voice came out quiet. Some part of me didn’t really want to know.
Wylder’s tone stayed flat, but he couldn’t quite wring the emotion out of it. “He didn’t want his heir getting distracted. Especially not by a girl. I was supposed to pump and dump them, not get attached. He saw it as a weakness and a threat to our security—if I cared too much, then our enemies could use her to manipulate me. So he decided the problem needed to be eliminated. He had her grabbed off the street, put a gun in my hand, and told me to shoot her.”
I flinched. “Did you do it?”
“No,” Wylder said savagely. “I told him he was fucking insane. He told me I was a shameful excuse for a Noble. Then he took the gun from me and did it himself. Axel and Titus were there—Titus had to hold me back from throwing myself at him, and even then I might have broken free if Axel hadn’t punched me hard enough to break my nose.” He rubbed the slightly uneven slant of it, the imperfection I’d noticed the first time we’d met. “And then it was already over.”
My throat constricted even more. “I’m so sorry.” It’d been bad enough losing Rowan and not knowing why, feeling he’d betrayed me. If I’d had to watch my father kill him in front of me…
Wylder finally looked at me again. “Ever since that day, I’ve been fighting my way back into his good graces. He’s never forgotten that I wouldn’t follow that one order. That I picked her life over his authority. If he had any reason to think I was at all invested in another woman now…”
Ah. It all made a bizarre kind of sense now. A humorless laugh tumbled out of me. “So what you’re saying is you treated me like shit not because of how little you care about me, but because of how much you do.”
Wylder’s eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t put it exactly that way.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” God forbid he spell out anything about his feelings for me even now. But that was okay. I wasn’t composing any sonnets in his honor either.
His story had doused the flames of my anger. All I had left in me was achy ashes. How could I be mad at him when he’d been trying so hard to keep me safe, even if it’d been in the most frustrating possible way?
But then he surprised me. “I am sorry,” he said. “I meant that. You didn’t deserve any of the crap I’ve thrown at you since we—since that morning in the kitchen. I didn’t mean any of it. And I should have known it wasn’t the right way. With Laurel—I kept her as far from the gang part of my life as I could. Whatever bits she did figure out, she assumed I’d protect her, because she sure as hell wasn’t equipped to.”
“But I can,” I said. “At least if I know what I need to be on guard against.”
“Yeah, you can. I don’t know whether to be glad about that or pissed off that it means I can’t get you away from my dad completely.” He offered me a pained-looking smile. “Make no mistake, Ezra is going to keep coming after you. He doesn’t react well to failure. You’re not safe now even if he has no idea that I’d want you to be. But we still have to do something.”
“Any suggestions?” I asked.
Wylder leaned forward. “You know, if this is the kind of crap my dad’s going to pull, I don’t see why I should trust his judgment in general. We can still carry out the plan I wanted to put in motion. If we can crush Bryant and the Steel Knights’ influence all on our own, he won’t be able to dismiss it. We’re going to earn his respect and end this once and for all.”