Page 92 of Devil's Dilemma

“Mel, I love you.” Pyro’s words are spoken loudly.

I swing around. “Do you?” I scream, my vehemence making him stagger a step back. “Do you? How can I believe a word that you or anyone says? How can I ever trust anyone again?”

“Mel, you’ve had a shock.” Red shoos Pyro away. “Pyro, she wants some space. Come Mel.” Now it’s the Vegas prez trying to put his arm around me, but I shrug him away too.

I walk up into the clubhouse and quickly take the stairs to the room that’s been made available to Pyro and me. I slam the door shut behind me.

I draw in air, then sob it out. Then do it again. Huge racking sobs start going through me, my body violently shaking as each escapes. If I thought thinking Skull was dead had upset me, it’s nothing to how I feel today. I’ve been torn apart. Everything I ever believed in taken away: my confidence, my ability to read people, my trust, my love which, at the end of the day, counted for nothing.

I can hardly breathe between my cries.

Who am I? A stupid woman who trusted a man.

Never again.

Never again will I give my heart to a man who has such power to hurt me.

“Darlin’…”

“Get out!” I scream at Pyro. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

He’s suddenly pushed aside from the doorway.

“Leave her be,” Rosa says as she enters the room. “Mel, hon, oh, Mel.”

Her arms I can tolerate as they come around me.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Pyro

Cop or not I should have killed him. May have meant I’d gone to prison for life, or, in Nevada, face the death penalty. But it would have been worth it to wipe that smarmy look off his face and stop those words coming out of his mouth that had so hurt the woman I love.

The woman who’s now pushed me away.

I want nothing more than to be the one comforting her.

As I stand, banished from the room from which I can still hear her distraught sobbing, Red approaches me.

His hand lands on my shoulder. “I have no words, Brother. I just don’t know what to say. What that motherfucker has done to that woman? He betrayed her trust in the worst possible way. She’s going to need a lot of help and support to recover.”

“She needs him dead.”

“She needs more than that, Pyro. Killing him is our way, a man’s way. She was out of control, in a situation she gave no consent to. Thought he’d chosen her as a life partner, she found out she was being used.” He tugs at his ginger beard. “Christ, we’ve all been taken for fools. May have happened in Colorado, but he pretended to be a true Devil, the betrayal touches us too. Yeah, I feel you. Think there’s a line forming of people who want to eradicate him, but that won’t help your woman in there. Closure is what she needs, and a dead body won’t provide that.”

A loud wail sounds from the room I’d so recently been thrown out of. I squeeze my eyes shut and tighten my hands into fists to stop myself opening the door that separates me from the woman I love. “I need to see her. Help her…”

Red’s eyes soften. “Know you do, Pyro. Know you’d give your fuckin’ life to make things right for her. I know this is fuckin’ hard for you to accept, but it’s not you she wants right now.”

She’s made that clear. “I thought it would be me she turned to.”

“Think, Pyro, think. She was with a man who claimed her, and told her he loved her. Now she knows that was all a game, and she got played.”

His words filter through my brain, and I hate the implication. “She doesn’t trust me.” That’s what hurts. Gets me in the gut as though I’d been sucker punched. At the bottom of it is the question, how can she have faith in any man ever again?

“She doesn’t trust herself right now, that’s the root of it.” His eyes go to the closed door, and like mine had seconds ago, close briefly as though he can feel the pain of her anguish. “Her judgment of character will be what is bothering her. Can she ever choose wisely in the future?”

I thought she had chosen, chosen me. “What do I do, Red?” My fist hits the wall, then hits it again. Why did the fucker have to reappear from the grave?

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