Page 80 of Where We Ended

I was going to give your precious Caelum to Alec as a gift, he has, after all, been pining for years for her. I was inclined to entertain his desires because she’d be out of your way and more importantly, out of the picture.

But now, I think I might want to keep her for myself.

She’s taken your good sense, and now cost Alec a hand…and honestly his remaining worth.

So I’ll trade you. Here is your brother, now give me your wife.

Leave her with the Stone Riders, walk away from her forever…or she becomes my plaything. Mine to torture and fill, and who knows, maybe she’ll give you a little sister after I fuck her enough times.

You know as well as that cunt of a mother that this girl was never supposed to be a part of the plan. - Fable

Silas didn’t show any signs that the letter had impacted him at all. He scanned the words, and then shoved the note in his back pocket, while tossing the hand at Alec’s feet.

Alec glared daggers at Silas, then shifted his glare to me, but his expression softened the smallest bit.

I ignored him and focused on Silas, turning away from the crowd so we had a small amount of privacy.

“What plan is he talking about, Silas?” My voice sounded strange… as if I’d found an empty well and started screaming into the darkness, my words all returning void.

Silas glanced down at me, his jaw tense and his eyes glacial.

I felt like fear had stepped out of that letter and took shape as a pair of shears, clipping my invisible wings. The ones I stupidly thought I grew after falling in love with Silas Silva.

Dirk had been my personal monster, but Silas had another…one much darker and more depraved. While I assumed I knew how to manage nightmares, it seemed there was another layer of deceit I had been oblivious to.

“Silas, what plan?”

His hand found mine, and suddenly he was pulling us away from the group. I heard Killian curse, and Wes start his bike. My brain connected the dots, aligning them into similar spaces they’d always fell into. I was merely a visitor in this place. I had no one that belonged to me…no one except Pen. I searched for her dark hair, that tiny piece of perfection she kept pressed to her chest as she soothed Connor. I looked for her husband, but they weren’t out here.

My gaze dropped to the ground as the gravel turned to grass.

I felt untethered, like I was fourteen again, waiting on a sun-soaked dock for Silas to come back to me. Just so my life would make sense again.

Suddenly a shadow fell over us as Silas pushed my back up against the side wall of the clubhouse, where no one could see us.

His hand planted next to my face, and his nose nearly touched mine.

“He always had plans for me to take over. That was the idea…Alec would be set up with his own club, but he wanted the Destroyers to be mine. My mother knew that was his plan…”

“If that was the plan then why join The Death Raiders as seventeen?” I searched his face, so clueless as to how I had missed so much when we were growing up. I blindly followed everything Silas said and did, too enraptured to ever question any of it.

He dipped, his head, his face solemn.

“Mom thought it would help put a barrier up between me taking over The Destroyers. We knew Dirk just had to die and I had a good chance of stepping in…it was my primary focus and why I went back so often. I needed to learn as much as I could about him.”

My arms came over my chest as if I could guard the pathetically weak organ that had absorbed all of Silas, taking in all his darkness and filtering it for the both of us. I was his beam of sunshine all doe eyed and in love, too naïve to ask questions or to demand to be included. I assumed he wanted to be there, doing his father’s bidding. I had assumed he was undercutting Fable, or working against him, but Sasha and him…they’d had actual plans in place. A goal to work toward. Something, all this time I could have partnered with them on. Perhaps if I’d been included, I could have told Silas about Dirk. Maybe if I was helping him take down Fable, I could have gone with him, or stayed somewhere else while he worked. Instead, I was just left behind.

His pretty piece of sunshine that stayed put in his room, there to absorb his darkness when he needed me.

Bitterness was a tangled root around my emotions.

“Did your mother ever tell you what happened with the trade?”

The gray hue of his eyes turned violent as he clenched his jaw. “No one has ever fucking told me what really happened, Natty. I came back and you were gone. I was given some bullshit reason, but no. I never got the full story. You sure as hell never told me.”

I hated how heavy that statement felt, and how even years later, the fear over his reaction and him self-destructing was too overwhelming for me to just open my mouth and explain it. But he’d never come back for me. “I’ve never had a chance to tell you, Silas. You were suddenly gone from my life, and I was here…and you acted like I was in a different world, unreachable.”

A breath escaped him as he hung his head.

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