“And here it is. Tempers are flaring. I’m not doing this, Rachel. This relationship is fucking cursed. Since you arrived, I’ve been stabbed, kidnapped, I’ve lost one of the longest members of this club — a man I considered a fucking uncle! My daughter has been burnt, my brother is dead, my mother is falling to pieces, my dad is dead, and we have a psycho out for our blood. It’s been two fucking months!”
“And I’m to blame for all for all of that?Macbethis the one who caused all this pain, and I’m the one who put a fucking stop to it!” I hissed, shoving him with all my might.
“Rachel… I can’t fucking do this! You don’t want to be here, and I’m done fighting about it. You were literally on the ferry to Ireland a few hours ago, and now you’re trying to convince me you want to stay. You mess with my fucking head. You make it so I can’t think straight. There’s a war coming, and I don’t want to be entering it off the back of yet another argument with you! You’re too much of a distraction, a weakness… Look what happened last time. I was supposed to protect Crash, and yet he died because I was too preoccupied with thoughts of you!”
“You can’t possibly blame me for that!” I gasped.
“I don’t! I blame myself! Why do you think I’ve been distancing myself from you? Because it’s easier to keep away, to pretend you’re just here for Bee, like planned. I can’t keep doing this. I’m riding a rollercoaster I never bought the fucking ticket for, and I’m sick of it!”
“You bought the fucking ticket when you kidnapped me!”
It was at that moment I knew he wasn’t going to budge an inch.
“I’m just done fighting for something that’s broken beyond repair,” he said, his jaw gritted.
“And I’m trying to tell you that thereissomething worth fighting for!”
“After all this time, you’re suddenly telling me you want to be here? You’ve made no secret of the fact that you can’t stand the club, and I’m making no secret that I can’t ever leave. What is there to fight for?”
“How about our ba—”
“Just go, Rachel! Jesus fucking Christ! Don’t you think this is hard enough? You win. I'm fucking tired. I need a woman by my side who wants to be there, not because she's staying due to some imaginary, invisible shackles.”
“Dante, you're not listening to me! You know, there's one thing I hate, and that's miscommunication. Yet you're forcing us into one of those relationships!”
“Am I? Or am I finally listening? Ever since I've known you, you've made no secret that you don't want to be here. Even after you accepted being my old lady, you've done nothing but complain you want to leave. There's no miscommunication here. I've finally opened my eyes.”
I almost roared with frustration, and I could feel my temper building. “No, because—”
“Just fucking leave!” He all but roared at me. “I don't want you here anymore than you want to be here!”
“If you can't see how hard I've fucking tried, then maybe you're fucking right! Yes, when I first arrived, I didn’t want to be here. I was bad tempered, I was mean, and I didn't give you a chance. I'll hold my hands up and admit that. But you weren't exactly perfect either! But I genuinely thought we had turned a corner recently, and—”
“You thought wrong,” he said quietly. “You've been kidding yourself. You've been forcing yourself to find things you like tostop yourself being miserable. I see that now. This is some fucked up version of Stockholm Syndrome. Go back to the Gellers—”
I cut him off with a harsh laugh, feeling almost hysterical. “The Gellers! Plop me right back in the life you stole me from. Almost as though it's a great reset and we never even existed. How fucking perfect!” I clapped my hands together and held them against my chest.
“Rachel…” he sighed, shaking his head, and that’s when my temper finally spilled over.
“Do you know what? You're right,” I snapped, throwing my head back and staring him right in the eyes. “I'm not happy here. I never have been. I was fooling myself that a decent sex life could make me happy. But the truth is, I despise you, your stupid club, and all the insane rules you follow. There's nothing here, other than that little girl, that has, or ever will, make me happy. I was pretending here, just like I was pretending with Alex. Just like I was pretending with the Gellers.”
I was hurt, and so I did the only thing I knew how to do. I lashed out. I wanted him to hurt as much as I was.“You have nothing to offer a woman other than some pathetic ‘protection’ from a shit club filled with outcasts. That’s the reason you all band together, because you know if you were to go out in the real world, no one would fucking want you! You’ve made your own society, because the civilised world doesn’t fucking want you!”
“And they want you, do they?” he snarled at me.
“I made a pretty good job of it before I had to fake every fucking smile in this place.”
“Someone give the budding actress an award. She knows how to fake a bastard smile.”
“An award isn't needed,” I smirked, seeing the flash of hurt in his eyes. “Being able to get the fuck away from this hellhole will be award enough.”
“Feel free to leave whenever you’re ready. Your shit is by the door where you left it. There’s a thousand in notes in an envelope for you. See it as payment for services rendered,” he sneered, raking his eyes down my body.
“Was that an attempt to humiliate and insult me? It failed miserably. I’m not going to be ashamed because I had sex with someone. But thank you for proving my point. Remember whenI said you were just like Alex? Bringing money into what I assumed was consensual sex just proves it was all a transaction to you. Your little insult was nothing but a self-burn, Dante. Well done for being on Alex’s level, though, how fucking thrilling for you.” Every word I spoke had a voice screaming in my head, telling me to stop. Telling me that there was no recovering from this. That this would be final.
But I couldn’t stop. I had to wound. I had to make him feel what I was feeling.
“And well done to you for being so beyond fucking damaged, that even the so-called outcasts of society don’t want a fucking thing to do with you. Enjoy your life, Rachel. Keep it as far away from mine and my daughters as possible.”
