Page 44 of Midnight Whispers

Once we’ve packed up Lisa and her girls’ meager belongings and put them in her vehicle with the girls, Cinder and I watch them drive off into the night.

Cinder turns to me under the stark one light in the parking lot. “That was a really nice thing for you to do.”

I shove my hands in my pockets. “No child should have to grow up around violence.” I don’t look at her, but I feel her eyes on me.

We’re both silent for a beat.

“I guess I’ll drive home now. My car is just parked over there.” She gestures with her hand.

“Leave it. You’re riding home with me. One of the staff will pick it up.”

She doesn’t argue and walks toward my vehicle, getting in as I said, and the fucked up part of me purrs from her doing my bidding.

Her eyes are on me as I start the car.

I look over. “What?”

Her blue eyes are wide. “Nero, what were you doing here when Freddie showed up? Why were you here?”

Fuck, with all the crap going on, I forgot she would question why I was in the parking lot of a dingy motel. I’m going to have to come clean with her. But I’m starting to think that maybe the obsessive, domineering side of me is about keeping her safe and protecting her, not about controlling her everyday life?we’ll save that for the bedroom.

Chapter

Nineteen

CINDER

“Nero, what were you doing here when Freddie showed up? Why were you here?”

At first, he doesn’t appear as if he’s going to answer me. He shifts the car into drive and leaves the parking lot. But I hope he’s not ignoring my questions, and he’s just framing his response.

“I don’t even know where to start.” He frowns at the dark road ahead, not glancing at me.

“The beginning is usually a good place.”

He nods, and a deep sigh slips from his lips. “My father was an asshole. That’s putting it mildly, I guess. He was a lot like Freddie was tonight, only his money and prestige protected him. Used to knock my mother around, beat my brothers and me. Did other deplorable things I’m not going to haunt you with. Pretty much made our lives hell until he died.”

My throat tightens. “Was… was he the one who murdered your mother?”

Nero shakes his head and something passes over his face but the emotion is so quick—there and then gone—that I have no time to make sense of it. “No. She had an affair with another man, and when she wouldn’t leave my father, he murdered her. Stabbed her in the heart with a pair of gardening shears right in the garden. She loved that garden…”

I wish we were already back at the manor so that I could wrap him in my arms and hold him for as long as he’d let me. If he’d let me.

Though I didn’t spend the last decade in the best of situations, what Nero endured sounds far worse than anything I can fathom.

I place my hand over his resting on the stick shift. “I’m so sorry. No child should have to deal with that.”

He doesn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on the road, but he nods. “That’s why I moved your friend and her girls. They shouldn’t have to worry about him showing up again. They’re probably already traumatized by whatever they’ve seen, never mind what went down tonight.”

Nero seems to always be protecting everyone. First me, and now Lisa and the girls. “Thank you for doing that.”

He nods again.

“But it doesn’t explain what you were doing there.”

His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “No, it doesn’t.” He gulps. “I told you that my mom died when I was six, and my father, thank God, died when I was twelve.”

My chest squeezes at all the loss he endured as a child. I know firsthand how it shapes you. “Was your dad sick?”

---