“I am a patient man.”
I kicked my heels back, and they slammed into Cas’s kidneys. He grunted but didn’t move. “Talk.”
I slammed my heels into him again, but then Ciel grabbedthem and pinned them to the mat while I thrashed. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. As soon as I get up, I’mleaving.”
“You’re going to leave us?” Cas pressed a little firmer weight on my arms. He angled them higher, and I flinched.
Obi shook his head. “You’re not going anywhere. You belong tous.”
“You wanted to fight; now here we are. Deal with the consequences of your actions,” Ryuji said.
“You’d really leave?” Ciel asked quietly.
I opened my mouth to snarl back, but what came out was a pained sob. I would never leave them. At the same time, there was no way I could talk to them about that ship. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no option but to stay pinned to this mat forever.
“You can threaten to leave all you want, baby girl, but we’re not going anywhere.”
“Whatever it is, we can face it together,” Wynn said. “That’s why we have one another.”
Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes. The memories rose to the surface like a high tide, and terror flooded my limbs. I would have started shaking if Cas wasn’t pinning me so firmly.
This wasn’t a panic attack. It was just plain and simple fear.
What if I told them what happened, and it broke me?
What if I couldn’t face the Albanians again?
What if admitting I was hurt was admitting I was vulnerable enough tobehurt?
What did that mean for my future dreams of running this city and protecting the women who lived in it?
“I can’t do it,” I admitted.
“Can’t do what?”
“I can’t go back there,” I cried. “Please don’t make me.”
“You can’t keep going like this,” Cas said. “It’s eating you up from the inside out.”
“I’m scared.” Tears dripped down my cheeks. I couldn’t look at them. It was too much. “It hurts.”
“I know,” Cas whispered. “I’m sorry it hurts. Let us help carry the pain.”
I buried my face in the mat. “I can’t.Please.”
He let go of my arms. Before I had a chance to fight him, he pulled me into his lap and crushed me to his chest. My eyes squeezed shut while I tried to stem my tears.
“Try,” he smoothed the hair from my face. “Like how you talked to Max and me after your mom died. Talking about it helped, didn’t it?”
“No,” I lied.
“I know it did,” he responded. “It helped both of you to talk about it. Back when your moms died, I could see neither of you were fine. You’d never felt loss like that before, not like I had. That’s why I brought them up all the time. I pushed you both to talk about them and remember them and joke about them. We would look at their pictures and tell stories, and I’d hold your hand while you cried. When we talked, when we joked and cried with each other, you felt better.”
He was right. I had forgotten about that. It had hurt so much I thought I’d never recover. I thought I’d never be able to walk in a world where my mother wasn’t there. Max held my hand when I went to sleep at night for months. Cas was at my house every single day.
I used to think I started feeling better after Dad and Uncle Massimo tracked down their killers, but that wasn’t true. Leaning on Max and Cas was what helped me move on. Knowing that they could see me in my pain and still love me…it didn’t take the pain away. I still grieved my mother’s loss, but they gave me courage to keep going.
“I should have done the same thing when Max’s father died,” he continued, pressing his cheek to my head. His arms tightenedaround me. “I should have made him talk to me, but I didn’t want to hurt him even more. Look at him now. I lost him because he never told us the truth about what he was going through. I saw him pulling away, and I did nothing. I can’t let that same thing happen to you.”
