He didn’t relent, pressing the box into my hands. “You can. This is what he wanted.”
It was as if I was on autopilot, doing what made sense to my mind but not my heart. I gazed down at the intricately carved wooden box and trailed my fingers lightly along the carved indentions. I wanted a redo. I wanted to go home. I wanted to tell Disco the three miniscule words he’d waited to hear for too fucking long because I was too much of a coward to say them.
I’d come so close to revealing what I felt the morning I left to take a trip to the grocery store, just before I’d returned home and found myself face-to-face with Zagan. I’d made a deal to erase Disco’s debt. I had intended to tell Disco before I left.
I had wanted to give him what he longed for most.
As I’d stared into his brilliant golden blue eyes, I had almost found the courage to reveal just how much I cared for him. But God help me, like the coward I was, I had hesitated. We both knew how I felt—it was the proverbial elephant standing in the center of the room. Even when he’d voiced his feelings, and I’d felt a warm flood of happiness in my chest, I’d remained quiet. I had been driven by the fears of a girl who continued to exist in the woman who had outgrown her.
Bitterness swept through me and, for the first time in a long while, I hated the drunk driver who killed my family, the State of Florida, and my former foster father and childhood destroyer, Ray Shaw, more than I ever had in my life.
Now I would never have that chance—to love, to cherish, to share the warmth and comfort of the most intense and indescribable emotion with another—and the finality of it seared into my soul. A portion of me that had only found new life was smothered forever and would no longer be able to breathe.
I accepted the light weight into my hands, walked into the large living room with bay windows that allowed me to see the sinking afternoon sun outside, and sat on Goose’s posh leather couch.
“Give us a moment,” Goose said quietly as he followed me.
I glanced up in time to see Bells take a right into the kitchen and Carter return to the entranceway of the house. The leather sank as Goose took a seat beside me, and he started to talk, telling me how he knew about me, my disappearance, and my arrival. But I wasn’t ready to talk to Goose. There was too much pain, too soon following my loss, so I listened instead and processed a story that seemed improbable.
Almost two weeks after my disappearance, Disco had been set to meet his close acquaintance and fellow vampire master, Joseph, to discuss business in the city. Disco had been distracted, upset and difficult to talk to. Joseph, being the absolute conniving bastard I remembered all too well, had used that knowledge to his advantage.
“Gabriel never saw it coming,” Goose said. “He was so concerned about you that he dropped his guard.” He inhaled raggedly, as if he needed to build up his courage for the next part. “I was with him when it happened. I was with him when he went.”
Looking directly ahead, into the setting sun, I braced myself. “Tell me.”
“Joseph came with Sonja and one of his family members so his intentions wouldn’t be obvious. We met at a warehouse near Brooklyn, the one Gabriel purchased just before you vanished. It wasn’t supposed to be anything special, a swapping of information. As soon as we entered, Gabriel knew something was wrong. A prominent family from Vermont showed up. They formed an alliance with Joseph, which meant one family too many in New York.”
“So they killed him.”
“Not without a fight. Gabriel challenged Joseph. The city is large enough to house multiple families, but it’s always been the unspoken rule that this territory belongs to Gabriel as it was passed down from his maker.”