Page 412 of Filthy Elites

I held out my arms. “Yes, I have arrived. If I’d known I’d become such a celebrity, I wouldn’t have waited so long.”

He scoffed and turned away, and Darius glowered at… his brother, rather than at me. Okay, something was seriously strange here.

Before I could prompt him to get on with his important talk already, the eldest Rosano brother ushered me over to the staircase, grasping the back of my arm but with more care than when I’d arrived from my trip around the city a couple of hours ago. “Will you come upstairs? I think this should be just between us. We can go to our rooms again—or your room, if you’d rather that.”

Between a rock and a hard place. I hated the memories the guys’ rooms stirred up, but there’d been plenty of recent encounters in the guestroom that I’d rather not dwell on either. At least the guys’ lounge area was larger and didn’t contain a literal bed. If I was going to be in close quarters with them, I’d rather it not betooclose.

“Your rooms are fine,” I said briskly, and pulled ahead of him to walk on my own.

When we reached the common room, I stepped to the side of the door, wanting to stay close to it for an easy escape route if I needed one. Darius didn’t object. Lucan looked up from where he was sitting at the desk, his hands poised over the keyboard of his laptop, and the same relief I thought I’d picked up on in Darius’s reaction flashed across his face.

He closed the computer and stood up to come around the side of the desk. As he leaned against the edge, crossing his arms over his lean chest, his brothers filled out a semi-circle around me. Darius stayed right in the middle of the room, while Felix sank down on the arm of the sofa. They all fixed their gazes on me as if they were trying to pierce through my skull with their thoughts.

“All right,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on, or are you just going to stare at me while I start making random guesses?”

They glanced at each other, and Darius squared his shoulders. “We need to talk about the morning you left.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean? I haven’t been out except this evening.” Well, and the other night too, but I wasn’t going to bring up that stealthy trip even if they already knew about it.

His jaw tightened. “Not now. The last time you were here. After we…”

He trailed off, looking so bizarrely uncertain that suddenly I was pissed off all over again. They’d used me and tossed me aside, and now he was getting all coy about actually saying what we’d done?

“After we all fucked,” I said flatly. “When we were teenagers. That’s what you’re talking about?”

Darius winced, and a flare of the anger that was more his typical expression these days came back into his eyes.

Before he could speak, though, Felix answered me in a drawl. “That would be the thing.”

I folded my arms over my chest but refused to give in to the urge to outright hug myself. “What about it?”

“Afterward,” Darius said in a growl. “You woke up before us and went out—and you ran into Holly.”

I blinked. “She told you that she talked to me?” I wouldn’t have thought she’d have admitted to spilling their secrets. And if she had, why were they acting like there was any kind of mystery here? Although maybe she’d only told them that I’d decided to leave and not why.

The edge in Darius’s voice sharpened. “Of course she did. Did you really think she wouldn’t? We needed to know.”

“Well, then, I have no idea what this conversation is supposed to be about,” I snapped. “You’re already totally filled in, and it obviously didn’t make any difference to you.”

Darius took a threatening step toward me. “Oh, it made a hell of a lot of difference. To find out you—”

Lucan coughed emphatically, cutting off his brother. “Anthea,” he said evenly, “what exactly did you and Holly talk about? Where did you go when you left this room? What were you doing when she found you?”

I dragged in a breath, on the verge of spinning on my heel and stalking out the door without answering. Who the fuck were they to treat this like some kind of interrogation? But the calm in Lucan’s voice and the hint of strain underneath it held me in place.

He sounded like he really wanted to know. Like he didn’t think he already did.

Even if Holly hadn’t told them about our conversation in full, hadn’t they figured out by now that I knew what they’d done?

Fuck it. If they wanted me to rub their faces in it, why the hell not?

“I didn’t go anywhere,” I said, putting all my concentration into keeping my voice steady. “I was going to wash up and get a change of clothes”—I’d even been thinking I’d whip up a nice breakfast for the guys so we could have a cozy morning together, all giddy after the affection I thought they’d wrapped me up in—“but Holly saw me coming out of your apartment. I guess it wasn’t that hard to figure out what’d happened.”

Darius had frozen. He stared at me as if I’d said something ridiculous. “She talked to you… right outside the door?” He gestured toward it.

I scowled at him. “Yes. Well, she saw me after a few steps and then motioned me over to the top of the stairs, since she couldn’t have known if you’d overhear her. And she told me everythingIneeded to know.”

Had Lucan paled? His next question came out even more obviously strained. “And what was that?”

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