Page 48 of Pretty Pink Poison
I wanted him like that always, his walls down, his feelings on display, and his smile in place for me. Just for me.
I got up and held down a voice message to send the Oracle App.
“Well, what do you do when you long for a man you can’t have and he wants nothing to do with you because you slept with his brother?” I took a deep breath as I stared at him. I took in how he slept like a man on a freaking magazine cover. “He’s here sleeping right now, and I hate that his face looks like the younger version of himself, so soft… well not soft, but less ruthless. I mean his lashes curl in the most delicate way, I swear. You’d think it wouldn’t be possible for a man to have this long of lashes honestly…” I sighed and rambled nothing of importance for a bit longer before saying, “I don’t talk to you about him because I’m embarrassed.” My voice cracked admitting it. “I’m embarrassed I don’t even remember the night that ruined everything with the one person I care about. It makes me so fucking wrong, doesn’t it?”
And the Oracle responded in agreement. It always agreed with me: I was the fucked-up one.
CHAPTER 14
BANE
I wokein the early hours of the morning, with the sun just barely in the sky. I woke with the dawn, breathing deeply, cataloging my mind and my mood before letting the day begin. Three breaths and three small truths was what I needed before I accepted the light of the day. A person should right themselves before they let in anything else. We should center ourselves first, tend to our inner chaos, before facing the world. It was a standard I held myself to.
One of many.
My other standard I’d failed at.
I opened my eyes, not nearly as disoriented as I should have been from a proper drugging, and looked around at the wreckage within the room where I’d failed at last night. I’d admitted too much, rejected her too little, and fucked our relationship up too perfectly to be as coherent as I was.
Bianca, my pretty pink poison, had mixed her concoction up wrong. I wasn’t nearly as fucked-up as I should have been to consent to all the shit we’d done.
I turned to look at her and still couldn’t hold back a smile at the mess that she was lying beside me.
Her curls were tangled, her robe open, the sheets hanging haphazardly on the bed.
She’d fucking drugged me, and I was letting her live to tell the tale.
And she was going to marry my brother. It was the constant reminder of her screwing him that should have pushed me to leave her alone, let her rot for five years until he was ready for her.
Yet, I was as messed up as she was. I always had been. Something about the way she was the chaos to my order made me want to reorganize her and make her functional.
And that wasn’t how I normally operated. I normally found the holes in someone’s life, found the crack in their structure, and then chipped away at it, bore down on it, and caused their complete destruction. It was what I was good at.
Yet, I wanted to tidy this girl’s life up and make her whole. Make her understand that her life, even if she didn’t care enough to take her meds and treat herself right, was precious.
I pulled her close to tuck the curls of her hair behind her ear and froze at the sight of her phone on the nightstand.
Fuck.
My tendencies were a war, not a choice, but I’d been fighting diligently for months now to control myself. I was trying to train myself to let go of her after hearing she’d slept with Rafe, but it took time. She’d been an obsession most of my life and I was used to finding out every single detail about her. Now, though, I’d pulled back. I didn’t go into her room or rifle through her belongings. I barely listened to the calls she made although she was right that I did warn off her family and friends. I only checked the call logs and listened to the tapped line because it was business now.
Her health was the one and only thing I allowed myself to obsess over, and still I missed the mark. I would make sureher gluten intolerance was monitored and managed. Her losing weight had caused my ass to lose weight too. I wanted to blame the nurses or her father for not at least sharing that relevant information with me. That fucker deserved to die for how he’d raised her. I knew there was more too. When I asked her, she looked away, as if she didn’t want to talk about it.
And she hadn’t talked about it. She suppressed it so much she didn’t even put it in her diary.
I was surprised none of us stabbed him with a fork. I saw the way my colleagues eyed him though. I’d missed the signs, and there was no one to blame but me. Had I been more diligent, had I not let my emotions for her cloud my focus, I would have caught it. I knew I would have. She wouldn’t have rashes, wouldn’t be in pain, wouldn’t have had to endure the consequences of my fuckups.
I’d been trained not to miss things like this. My father had always been as meticulous and exacting as I was, and he’d told me countless times that I was one of the few people capable of carrying the burden of knowledge on my shoulders. Every detail mattered. Every piece of the puzzle had to be checked—thrice over—because someone I cared about could get hurt otherwise.
He was hard on me, unrelenting even, but he was right. And I would make sure I never failed like that again.
Staring at her phone and considering if I should go through her digital life was what I would have called an overstep before last night.
Now, in the end, I found myself reaching for the device because Bianca had said something that rang true. I was Bane Black. And above all else, boundaries didn’t exist between her and me. They never would again, either, because I wouldn’t sacrifice her health again.
I wasn’t a saint, nor was I ever going to be. Plus, my excuse was that I’d accepted the position of keeping the family affairs in order, and that meant keeping her in line for five years.
The Oracle app I found on her phone was a hack journal entry startup that should have been going nowhere. Except I saw it was popular enough for those who wanted therapy or a shoulder to cry on in this day and age.
