Page 60 of Kylo
That said, bringing her in meant she was going to find out. About it all.
That our first meeting wasn’t just happenstance.
That I’d been lying to her from the jump.
That, yes, I’d been following her, noting down her every move.
That I wasn’t the good guy she wanted to believe I was.
Yeah, I got it.
Club over everything.
But, fuck, I didn’t expect it to have to come over her.
I hadn’t been expecting her, period. Or the strange, almost overwhelming urge I had to not only get my hands on her again,but to protect her, to show her it was safe to explore the world a little more.
I knew damn well that the second she found out the truth, she would never trust me again.
Yes, she’d been lying too. But her lie had been to protect herself. From Marco and his crew. From the law.
I couldn’t claim as much.
“Look, I get it. You don’t want some innocent dragged deeper into this shit, but this is how it has to be. You bring her in, or I do it.”
Absolutely not.
The woman was barely hanging on as it was.
The last thing she needed was someone else to scare the shit out of her.
It had to be me.
No matter how much I hated that.
“Fine. Tuesday. She’s off Tuesday. I’ll bring her here Tuesday night.”
After giving her what I promised her: a day away from her worries. Another thing or two to notch off her bucket list. Something good before I turned it all to shit.
“Alright. We’ll be here. And we can figure out what she knows. Then decide what to do from there.”
I bit back the urge to say that if our entire strategy relied on a terrified woman already roped into a bad situation, then we really needed to work on ourselves. That was only going to get me in hot water and get Rue scooped up by someone unfamiliar and terrifying.
“We’re not going to hurt her, Kylo,” Huck reminded me.
Not physically, no. Not this club.
But I don’t think he was grasping how fragile she was. The months of dealing with Marco were clearly grinding down her defenses, making it impossible to keep the anxiety anddepression from sucking her in again. Add in that things seemed to be escalating with that crew, and, yeah, she was just barely holding it together.
Finding out that one of the very few people in her life she thought was solid had been lying to her from the jump was not going to help her mental health.
“Think you’ll find she’s a lot stronger than you’re giving her credit for,” Huck said, reading my mind.
Easy for him to say.
He hadn’t held her while she cried.
He hadn’t been watching her get more and more beaten down with each passing day.
