“Crew…” Her eyes narrow. “What’s going on?”
“I’m expanding the fighting ring.”
“What do you have to do with that?” Her eyebrows pinch and her nose scrunches.
“Everything. I started them.” I brush her hair back off her face.
“You…” But she doesn’t finish her sentence. The wheels behind her eyes clearly spinning in circles. “You’re the owner?”
I nod.
“Do the guys know?”
“No one knows except the people who work for me.” I spin a blonde lock of her hair around my finger. “And now you.”
“Not even Jude?”
I shake my head.
“Sage?”
“No one.”
It’s cute she can’t put the pieces together, but she keeps trying. She can’t connect why I’d tell her and not them because she still doesn’t understand she’s becoming an exception.
She breathes out her surprise. “Why?”
“It’s none of their business,” I say honestly.
“Is it really that hard for you?” She takes a step back, looking me over.
“What?”
“Letting people know you’re capable of more?”
After our conversation in the car, I’m surprised she has to ask. Of anyone, she obviously thinks the least of me, and still, I can’t take my fucking attention off her.
“You tell me. Is it?”
Me returning her question makes her pause. Her shoulders tense, and she must realize she hit a nerve.
“I’m sorry about what I said.” She frowns.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
I grip her chin. “Echo, I’ve given you no reason to think I give a shit about anything. Don’t worry. I get it.”
“But now you told me this.” She bites her bottom lip. “You clearly don’t want anyone knowing you run the fight nights, but now I do. Why let me in?”
Her eyebrows scrunch, and I know what she wants my answer to be—it’s the same thing she was begging me to tell her on the car ride here. That I’m the right choice. That my brother is the mistake. That I can offer her the safety she’s desperate for after surviving the way she was raised.
She wants me to tell her this is real, and I won’t get bored and toss her away.
But I don’t. And it’s not because I wouldn’t mean it. But Echo needs to come to that realization herself, without my direct influence or Rhett’s. Anything else will just be her playing into what someone else wants from her. Pieces she needs to stop handing out.
No matter how much I crave them.
