No one wanted me. My brother was doing his duty to me, bringing me home, but no one wanted me for anything other than just having me. They wanted to use me, to destroy me.
I hated it.
My feet carried me to the stairs, and I halted as I saw Lucas at the bottom, his eyes on me. There was no emotion on his face, nothing that told me that he had just decided he was making a mistake.
He was glad to get rid of me.
The pain hit me full force, but I bit my lower lip to focus on something else as I made my way down the stairs, idly wondering if he would even bother to catch me if I fell. “That’s it?” he asked, arching a brow.
“I didn’t come with anything,” I answered, lifting my chin. “Remember?”
I wasn’t about to tell him that the only thing in the backpack was the books he had provided and one of his dress shirts, selfishly taken from his closet because his scent was still on it.
“All of this was all yours,” Lucas said softly, his eyes searching mine. “I bought it for you.”
“You can burn it,” I fired back, hoping that I was holding myself together as well as I thought I was. Seeing him was enough torture, and I had hoped I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to Lucas.
Yet here he was, his devastatingly handsome self attempting to find some solace in me leaving. Didn’t it bother him? Didn’t he feel the same gnawing pain about me walking out of his life forever?
“Do you even care?” I found myself asking softly. “That I’m leaving?” I needed to know that he had a shred of decency in him and that this bothered him, that maybe he didn’t truly want to do this.
Lucas’s jaw clenched, the only sign that he was even remotely reacting to my words.
My feet halted on the stairs, unable to move. So, he wasn’t going to answer me.
“I should have known,” I said, shaking my head. “I should have known you wouldn’t answer me. God, Lucas, is it really that bad to care for someone else?” I knew I was baring my soul to him, but at this moment, I didn’t care. He needed to know how badly he had hurt me.
He met me halfway, one step lower than I was. I flinched as he reached out and took some of my hair in his hand, sliding his fingers slowly down my long tresses. “You have no fucking idea what I feel.”
“I know,” I answered. “That is the problem, Lucas. You said you loved me, but right now, I don’t feel love. I don’t feel anything from you, and I should. I wanted to.”
I couldn’t go on. I wanted to tell him how much I needed to feel his love, to break down even one of his walls and have him let me in when I needed him the most. He had said he was going to protect me, but that would have meant protecting my love and my heart as well. “And now you are pushing me away again.”
Inwardly I was begging for him to say something, anything that would make me feel like this was a hard decision for him.
But he just released my hair, clearing his throat. “Everything I do,” he said. “I do for you.”
Reaching from behind his back, he held out his hand. “Take this,” he said instead, his words more urgent than I had ever thought I would hear from him.
I looked down to find a gun in his hand. What did I expect? A ring?
“Why?”
“Because,” he growled, urging it toward me. “You are about to walk out of my fucking house unarmed. I would feel better if you were armed.”
A hollow laugh escaped me, and I forced my eyes to meet his. “I’m leaving because you are forcing me to, Lucas, not because I ever wanted to. You don’t get to kick me out and then toss me a parting gift out of pity.”
Pushing him aside, I was almost at the bottom of the stairs before I looked back. He looked nothing like the powerful don he should be but almost like a broken man, a man who didn’t know what he had in front of him right now. “I thought I might have been enough,” I finished, the words coming out easier than I had expected them to. “But clearly you need something I can’t give you.” It was the truth. My brother had risked everything to keep Rory, even when she had clearly hated him. He had moved his entire existence to have her in his life, and I wanted the same.
I wasn’t going to settle for anything less. I wanted Lucas to grin, to smile, to have a life that he could be proud of, and whether he was don or not didn’t matter to me.
I just wanted him to be happy, and there had been a moment in time that I thought he was.
Again, it was nothing more than an act, one that I was learning he was really good at. Lucas flinched, but I was already moving toward the door, leaving the gun in his hands. I didn’t need anything else from him. I had already expected the world, and yet, all he had done was break me in the end.
I was going to come back stronger, but not because of him. I was going to show the world that I was more than a Mafia princess. I was Leda D’Agostino, and they weren’t going to break me. This had been a hard lesson learned, one that I wasn’t about to forget anytime in the near future.
But I would get over it. Slowly.