Page 127 of Poison Aches

“I don’t understand,” she whispers. “Why…?”

“I’m helping you.” She stays silent, waiting. “Well, it means I’ll help you in every way you need me.”

“In exchange for this?” she screeches.

“Is it so absurd?”

“Yes!” she gasps. “My God, Emmett, do you really think I’m going to sign this?”

“I don’t think,” I stare at her. “I already know you’ll sign it.”

“Just like that?”

“Of course,” I shrug. “Don’t you remember? You’re the one who proposed this.”

“We were children!”

“Were we?”

She opens her mouth to retort but then freezes. Then she looks back down at the binding contract in her hand.

“I can’t believe this.”

“And I can’t believe you’ve been keeping quite a lot of information from me, Angel. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

She turns to look at me, watching me, studying me. I wait patiently.

“What information?”

I lean forward to get closer to her. So close that her face is in my grasp. I run my thumb along her jaw and then stare into her eyes to catch her deceit.

“That you remember.”

Surprise flares first in her brown eyes, and then as I expected, a flood of guilt.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand, the thing in my chest doing summersaults.

“I…”

“All these years, you’ve been lying to my face, keeping the truth from me that you got your memories back.”

This time, her gasp is audible, the look of utter terror on her face makes me almost laugh, but this is not a laughing matter. It’s never been funny. “Why?”

And this is the fucked-up part about everything.

“Emmett…”

“Why, Angel?”

“I…”

“That hellish night, you witnessed it,” I say each word as if it's being extracted from the depth of my damned soul with a rusty iron hook. “You saw them take my mother away. I saved your life, several times, thinking that you’d come to me the moment you remember but what did you do? You intentionally went out of your way to feign ignorance.”

“No, no, that’s not…”

“Imagine my shock when I found out that it's been years since you recovered your memories but you’ve kept them from me.”

Anger and something dangerously close to disappointment swells up in my chest.

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