Page 23 of All Tied Up
I shrugged. Whatever. It wasn’t like he was a saint. He’d sliced Halo’s throat before he fell in love with her. He was the damn psycho. Not me. I was just taking care of what was mine.
“Best way to clear a place out is a little fire,” I replied, then chuckled before taking another drink.
Bane shook his head. “Jesus, you’re nuts, and I thought you were the sane one.”
“Desperate times and all,” I replied as if that excused my actions.
“How much did you pay him?”
I set the bottle between my legs and sighed. “Six months’ rent. Immediate wire into his account the second I had live footage from his phone of the restaurant being evacuated and Noa rushing out the door. He was already behind two months on his lease of the place, so he was desperate. That was just fucking luck.”
Bane leaned back in his chair and blew out a breath. “Damn.”
“It was better than killing her date,” I mused. Which I still might do. If he didn’t stay the fuck away from her.
“Or selling him to the cartel,” Bane added with a shake of his head, then took another drink of water. “You’ve got some twistedshit in your head. We need to be using it for more than your obsession with this woman.”
“Not an obsession,” I bit out through clenched teeth, annoyed.
“Then label it,” he shot back at me.
Label it? Was there a label for it? I sat there, staring straight ahead, as I dissected the way I felt. How I reacted to her.
Finally, I looked back at Bane. “A necessity.”
Bane blew out a breath and stood back up. “Ah. So, you’re in love.”
No, the fuck I was not. This wasn’t about love. I required Noa in my life. She was indispensable. There was no one else that centered me or made me feel … whole. Balanced things for me. Cleared the shit from my head. She gave me peace.
“And that, my friend, is what love is,” Bane drawled with amusement. “Welcome to the club.”
I watched him as he walked toward the door, headed back to bed with his wife. Apparently, I’d had so much to drink that I was speaking all my thoughts without realizing it.
“I’m not in love,” I called out after him. “That’s a fucking dumb emotion. It makes you weak. Messes up your head. Controls you.”
Bane stopped and turned back around. He raised one of his eyebrows as he stared back at me. “And you sitting in here, watching her sleep on the hidden cameras you placed in her apartment, isn’t you being controlled? Your head was clear today when you decided to pay a man to set a fire in his place of business? Or when you handed a man over to the cartel without going through the line of authority?”
I said nothing.
“Right. That’s what I thought,” he finally said.
When he walked away this time, I let him go. Bastard had said shit I didn’t need to hear.
Swiping my finger over my phone screen to open up thecamera I’d been watching before he interrupted me, I sighed heavily. Just the sight of her eased me. Not completely because I wanted to talk to her. Reassure her. Explain why I had gone silent. But it did help me breathe.
Ah fuck.
Bane might be right.
Dammit all to hell!
Eleven
Noa
Twenty-Eight Days Since Ransom Left …
While my manuscript had needed me to stay inside tonight and continue to work on it, my sanity required I get the hell out of the apartment. Not that I was counting … okay, I was counting … but it had been four weeks of silence from Ransom. It was time to face the fact that we were over.
