She’s not Persephone. She’s Melanie Meyers Dean, and I love her.
I exhale and put my face in my hands, shuddering as I try to get a grip on myself.
I’m sick and she’s the only cure.
I’m sick for her, as sick as my father.
I glance up and he’s hardly moving in bed, the sound of his breath low and even. Yeah, it hurts. I hated him all my life. He took everything good from me. And it still hurts that he’s weak and mortal, and still, the motherfucker clinging fiercely to where my mother is.
Rage, impotence, it all swells in my chest. I’ve just worked my last mark with the help of Tina’s information. I carefully worked around my numbers so that only one mark remains . . . number five.
“The list?” Eric anxiously asks me after conferring with the doctors and realizing my father only has hours left. Hours.
“I’m going to get the payment,” I lie, pushing the chair back and rising.
But I won’t. I’m going to get back my girl, and then I’m going to come back here and tell my father that he failed. That he failed in making me like him. In making me completely selfish and evil.
I’m going to get back my girl and I’m going to fetch some of my cash and buy back my girl’s paper. He can put any price he wants on it. He can put my own life on it. Or the price of the Underground. But he’s going to tell me where my mother is, and he’s going to watch me scratch off Melanie’s name while I hand him the cash she owes.
He will think me weak. He will die thinking me weak.
I don’t give a shit anymore.
I’m fighting for what I care for and I’m going to fight for it if I spend the rest of my days in the shadows, making sure my girl’s all right.
TWENTY-TWO
* * *
DECISION
Melanie
“I want to go home.”
Those are the first words that pop out of my mouth the next day when Greyson stands at my hotel room door, all in dark clothes, freshly shampooed hair. Not my prince. Not my knight in shining armor. Rather my villain in black.
“I really want to go home,” I repeat in a hoarse, broken voice. “I’ve thought about . . . our conversation and I just want to go home today.”
That’s all I say.
Not, hey. Not good morning. I don’t even comment on the box he holds, or the gerbera daisy he’s loosely holding in his hand, like the one he pinned to the wall in my parents’ home. Emotion seizes me as I remember that day, how real he was, how fun it was.
Those who play together, stay together . . .
That’s not true, Nana. Sometimes men just play with you and break you.
I can’t even say Greyson didn’t warn me.
I feel like a vampire just sucked all the blood out of my heart as I open the door wider to let him in. The room shrinks as he enters, his gaze never leaving mine as he sets everything down on the coffee table as if he’s probably just realized I don’t want any presents. I don’t even want to have a birthday.
“Hey,” Pandora greets him from where she was having coffee at a small dining table. It’s the first time she doesn’t sound so hostile toward him. Maybe because we talked all morning about it, she finally convinced me, and I convinced myself that he IS ALL WRONG FOR ME.
But now that he’s close, it’s so hard to believe that.
I can feel his grief as he follows me to my bedroom.
My insides scream at me to launch myself into his arms and work it out. How can we not work it out? He’s owned me. For over four months, he, and everything he is, has owned me. But I need him to let me go or he will break me.
I’m too much of a romantic; he’s too hardened, too cold with what he’s done all his life.
When I close the door to my room, suddenly I turn, and he pulls me to him and kisses me. We kiss, not fighting it, instead melting into each other’s mouth as we kiss longer than we’ve ever kissed. Minutes and minutes and minutes. My wanting body sinking into his hard one, his hands holding me by the small of my back tightly pinned to him. Our tongues move faster than ever, starved, as we memorize each other’s taste, the silkiness of our kiss. Until he groans and yanks himself free and heads toward the window.
I see him struggling to pull up his walls again. Walls I wrecked because I wanted him to love me. He does. I know he does. It was in his touch and the desperation in his eyes right now, like he wants to let me go, but can’t.
He stands facing the window, hands in his pockets in that take-on-the-world stance of his that I love. Every inch of me knows he’s aware of me, but he doesn’t acknowledge me until he speaks, without turning, his voice so raw it scrapes my insides like a saw. “Are you sure leaving’s what you want?”
“I’m sure,” I say, my voice also like sandpaper.
His voice breaks with huskiness when he adds, “Derek can drive you to the airport then.”
“I can take a cab.” I take a step toward him and stop. What am I going to do? Hug him? I can’t. I need to break this.
I see the gloves he threw on the bed and lovingly take them in one hand, needing to feel them one more time. He turns and looks at me, and it cuts me to look into his eyes. His proud Greyson King eyes. I drop my eyes to the ground and start blinking.
“Whoever you end up with, just know you were mine first. A part of you will always be mine. When you find your prince charming, the one who has everything you’re looking for, perfect, you’ll still be my fucking princess and not any other’s.”
My eyes water because his words hurt, the truth in them hurts as I press his gloves into his hands. “Please let it go, even that part.”
“I could make you love me, Melanie. I can make you choose me.”