Page 52 of Cruel Debts
Asher already knelt at Trinity's side, but she wasn't entertaining his attention. In fact, she looked downrightoutragedat him. I hated to know how much of that was for me, too.
"So if you knew, then why didn't you say anything?" It wasn't like her to hide her knowledge of the truth. Any time we'd ever lied to her before, she took great pleasure in goading us, in proving she couldn't be lied to. That we weren't as sneaky as we thought. But this time? She'd acted in the shadows. She hadn'ttrusted us to know she knew. Either she thought we didn't know, or she wanted us to come clean on our own.
Either way, we blew it in spectacular fashion.
"Why didn'tyou?"she countered, her eyes burning with unshed tears. "You didn't trust me."
"It didn't concern you," Asher tried, but that only made things worse. Trinity stood, her hands moving from her sides to land squarely on his pecs, which she shoved him back with.
"It concerned memost of all,Asher! Youknewwhy I was here. Youknewhe knew something. And now, to find out you never even thought to ask him to identify the body he pulled it off of?" Her tears fell, trailing down her cheeks as a flush of pink tinted them in her anger. "You wasted all this time?—"
"There's no guarantee he's still alive," I pointed out, hating myself for it. But I couldn't let her spiral like this. It wasn't safe, even with the gun safely out of her hands. "There's no guarantee?—"
"There's never a guarantee, Liam, but that doesn't mean youstop trying."
She was right. And I'd never felt shittier than I did in that moment. What kind of friend was I? All these resources at my fingertips, and I'd just let him down. Let us all down.
"It means you tryharder."
As she stormed off, Asher on her tail, I stood there wondering why I'd never really bothered to look deeper. To look closer, for the truth. Why I'd let the assumed truths speak volumes, when a single question might've changed the whole trajectory of this situation.
Maybe I didn't want to know the truth. Because knowing the truth would make it real, and that meant admitting we'd been shitty friends to Keehn the minute we left the military. That we'd only shown up when it was too late.
We didn't deserve Tank. And we sure as shit didn't deserve Trinity McCoy.
The thought was sobering.
TWENTY-THREE
TRINITY
The fuckinggallof these men. They were smarter than that.
I knew they were. I grew up with them.
So why were they being so stupid now?
I refused to speak to them when we all finally made our way up to the dorm. I didn't have a key, so they had no choice but to follow me, or leave me out in the open, which they'd said a million times already that they didn't want to do.
So the choice was clear—I had to deal with it myself. And if that meant striking it out on my own still, like I'd planned for a while now, then so be it.
I stormed around my room for about an hour before I realized it was getting me nowhere. Okay, so maybe it was time for a shower. Or a nap. Or something.
Or maybe I should treat myself to a self-love session and make them listen.
All those ideas had their merits, but in the end, I decided on a shower. I felt dirty, both from handling a gun I had no business putting my hands on, since I couldn't fire one to save my life, and because of the whole interaction with the man pretending to be my brother.
I couldn't believe they were letting someone run around pretending to be Keehn. That they felt justified in using him to whatever ends they needed, just because he needed their silence. That the whole charade went on under everyone's noses. Somehow, nobody back home ever picked up on someone else using Keehn's name for gainful employment. Or if he did, he never mentioned it to our parents.
Or maybe he did, and they just assumed he'd run off.
No. There was no way. My parents would have found a way to drag him home if that were the case. They wouldn't let their heir apparent wander off into his own life when they had his future all planned out. When his every move in life was already written on a page in their book for him.
He was just like me in that regard: our parents never planned to let us do what we wanted unless it fit neatly into their little plans.
Perks of being raised as the heirs to an empire.
As I stood under the scalding water of the borrowed shower intended for my brother once upon a time, I thought over what led us here. How a single instance, a chance encounter, had shaped my life in a completely different way than what I'd ever intended. How that one moment, that one man, brought me unwillingly to a strange place and somehow deposited me in front of the men I'd loved since I was young.
