Page 100 of Bad Enough

And you can’t use the excuse that you didn’t know. It was always your way: deny, deny, deny.

“I failed her,” TB acknowledged. “I did promise I’d protect her. I may have kept her out of the hands of her stalker, but I didn’t protect her from me and my self-destructive nature.”

“Finally, he understands,” God mumbled.

TB’s attention was drawn back to the conference room.

“Who are you, Flame?”

The question came from Midas.

Clearing her throat, her eyes focused on Midas, saying, “What do you want to know?”

Midas had a folder in front of him with her name on the tab. A very thin folder.

Midas opened the folder and looked up at her, his expression blank.

The open folder revealed about a dozen small, stapled sets of paper. Midas laid them out neatly on the table with deliberation, identifying each one as he did so. “Social security number. State I.D. A savings account containing just over eight million dollars. A checking account with over forty thousand dollars in it—only debit card transactions and automatic payments for bills. No credit cards. Five years of tax returns claiming earnings from writing your books—all showing huge amounts of earnings each year—no other declarations. A title on the house, which is paid in full. A history of gas and electric, cell phone, and internet usage. A website and social media accounts dedicated to your twenty-five books, but no personal pages or accounts. That’s it. Nothing else. And none of it goes back more than six years. Prior to that, you did not exist.”

She did not look down at the papers. She simply stared at Midas.

“I’ll ask again. Who are you? Because this”—Midas waved a hand over the papers—“is not a real person.”

“My name is Sylvan Jones. You can see I’m exactly who I say I am.”

“But only for the past six years. Who were you before that?”

Her gaze was steady on Midas, but TB took in the hard swallow, the pulse beating skittishly in her neck, and the fists clenching and unclenching repeatedly in her lap.

“I was the same person I am now.”

Waters broke in. “Let’s not play semantics games, Flame. Characteristics aside, you were most definitely not known by the name you are now. It didn’t exist back then.”

Midas took back over. “Flame, why did you not exist prior to six years ago?”

Her gaze finally broke, going to her hands in her lap.

Tears threatened to fall from her eyes, and TB felt himself wanting to pull her out of that room and hide her somewhere.

A shape knelt down at her side. Nemo. He turned the chair slightly and reached into her lap, his hands resting over hers. “Flame, look at me.”

Liquid emerald eyes looked at the blond playboy.

He smiled gently at her. “While it’s entirely possible that what you say is true, we’re all in agreement with Waters. You need to tell us. There’s very little you could say that we haven’t heard before. No one will judge you.”

“You can’t promise that, Nemo,” she whispered as she looked back down at their hands in her lap. “That’s already a lie. I can feel his judgment from here.”

No one needed to identify whose judgment she was referring to.

He fought the discomfort, locking it down. On the inside—sick to his stomach at whatever was coming. On the outside—badass and pissed. But not for the reasons most people would have guessed.

Nemo reached to tip her chin up so that her eyes met his again, then he raised one of her hands to his mouth, kissing the knuckles, followed by rubbing his thumb across them. He smiled encouragingly at Flame. “We all have secrets. Each and every one of us, including Mr. Totally Stupid. Some of them are worse than others. All of us have felt unredeemable. Some of us still do,” he emphasized. “No matter what, we’ll protect you. And you know TB has your back, even though he’s refusing to admit to his feelings.

“But he’s being that way right now because he’s scared. When he feels like he can’t control things, he lashes out. Some people would say that’s immature. That he’s throwing a temper tantrum. But that’s not it at all. His brain doesn’t process fear like a normal person’s. He can only process fear in the form of anger.”

Nemo flicked a quick look over her shoulder to the camera embedded in the frame of the painting behind her. TB knew where Nemo was about to go, and his stomach dropped in a real moment of regret.

Don’t, Nemo. Let it go.

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