“Why won’t you look at me, Lilah?”
“I can’t,” she whispered. The pain in her voice brought a storm of torture down upon my soul too. “If I do, I’ll end up ruining everything for both of us.”
“How can you say that?”
“We can’t be together. I— I’m sorry.” She combed her hands through her hair before glaring up at me. “You have to move on. I have to also. We should be friends like we were. We’re better off that way. If we date… Our families, Dante.”
“You knew that reason before.”
“It’s still a good reason. It just wasn’t one I made the right decision on in the past. And I’m sorry about that.”
“So what? You want me to forget this happened?”
“Yes.”
“Forget I took the most sacred thing from you?” I was whisper-yelling at her.
She bit her lip. “It won’t be that sacred once I’m with others, Dante. And you’ll move on too. There’s a line of women at the bar that’ll be more than happy to make you forget.”
I shook my head at her. “I don’t think you’ll forget. I won’t either.”
“We can try. Please. Let’s just be friends.”
Shit, a woman was begging me to forget her, but I was standing there like I couldn’t let her go. It wasn’t right. I’d tried. I’d damn near begged her on my knees to stay with me. “Fine, Lilah. Try. Try all you want. But if they can’t make you feel like I make you feel, you’ve got the wrong one.”
* * *
Her mother toldmine that she thought Lilah was going through depression from being at college, that she’d get over it. She was the strongest of the bunch, plus they had to worry about Izzy.
Izzy, who’d been a little hellion growing up but had been right by Dom, Dex, Declan, and Dimitri when we ran amuck.
Izzy was close to death. Close enough that I feared for her life. Opioids could grab ahold of you like that, tear apart your life while destroying all the people in the way. And she was family. We were going to be in her damn way. We didn’t leave family behind. I’d stuck by my mom and her mom to scoop up the pieces of that girl. I took her under my wing, even though I wanted to do something totally different to her twin sister.
And Izzy made it. She was one of the lucky ones even if she was undercover in jail at the moment.
“Lilah, I care about Izzy too. You know she’s one of my best friends, okay? But you have to believe me when I say this is for the best.”
Her eyebrows slammed down as she scoffed at me and tried to kill me with a glare. “Oh, I know how good of a friend she is to you, Dante. Which is why I’m disgusted that you would even try to leave her here.”
Anger wasn’t the norm for her. Sadness, pain, embarrassment—that’s what I’d seen from her over the past five years. I’d never seen her this mad. I dealt with terrorists who were mad. I was fine handling that. I could waterboard a guy for so long he got over that anger real quick. I dealt with civilian women who were mad at me too, but normally I fucked their anger into submission.
I couldn’t do that with Delilah.
Even if I wanted to.
“Look, I think you should practice that breathing technique while I drive away from here. Idling in a place like this—”
“We’re not going anywhere without my sister.” She shoved my hand off the gear.
The spark came from our contact that time. The same spark I got when Iwantedto have someone submit to me.
Fuck.
“Delilah, you’re like family to me, you know that. Izzy, too, but you know that Izzy has been in trouble for a long time. Opioid addiction–”
She cut me off as her voice cracked with emotion. “Don’t start. Do not even start with putting up an excuse from her past to justify what you’re about to do to her future. So what if she was addicted to something?” A new fire stirred in her eyes. “So what, Dante? I was there too. They don’t know whether I did it or she did. We’re both guilty. If I get out, she should too.”
Her loyalty to her sister, the willingness to defend, made her a lot stronger to me in that moment.