Page 7 of Midnight Whispers

I pull my hand from hers and stand, straightening my suit sleeves. “I don’t care who he is. He can have you.”

Her head rears back, and her mouth hangs open as if I struck her. “What are you saying?”

I lean in over her and meet her gaze. “There’s nothing I hate more than a liar.”

She reaches for my suit sleeve, her arms wrapping around mine, and stares up at me with pleading eyes. “But I made a mistake. I can make it up to you?—”

I’m not interested in watching her beg to keep my affections. “The wedding is off. Keep the ring, I don’t give a shit.”

She stands, and I step back. “That’s it? You’re just going to leave me?”

I keep my expression neutral. “What did you expect? It’s too bad. If you’d told me you were interested in sleeping with another man, maybe we could have shared you.” I shrug. “What’s done is done. As are you and I. Goodbye, Maude.” I make my way toward the door.

“Wait! Wait! Nero!” She rushes behind me and grips my elbow, trying to turn me around. “I’m sorry.”

I face her with one hand on the doorknob of the estate’s front door. “I’m sure you are.”

I swing the door open and walk toward my car, listening to her dissolve into sobs behind me. When I reach my car, I glance at the front door. Maude’s sister comforts her as their mother stands in the open doorway, watching me leave with a pissed-off expression that could challenge mine. Once the door is shut, I start my engine.

Good riddance.

I punch the steering wheel, my emotions coming to the surface once I’m alone.

Taking one last look at an estate I’ll never be at again, a flicker of movement in the attic catches my eye, but when I look up, the curtain is in place over the small window. I must be seeing things. No one else lives in that house, and I just saw all three women at the front door.

Shoving the car into drive, I whip around and then down the dirt road that leads out to the main road, ready to put this marriage shit behind me.

Chapter

Four

NERO

I’ve spent the last week in a blur, either being drunk or high most of the time, neglecting my duties at Voss Enterprises. I don’t care. Let Asher scream at me. He’d be doing me a favor. Calling off my wedding because my fiancée is a cheating bitch put me in a “don’t give a shit” mood.

The weird part is that while I’ve been sullen, moody, and wallowing, it’s not really because of Maude. It’s that I thought I had someone who loved me—finally—after so many years without love, and it was all a lie.

The same way my father’s love was a lie, though he only ever tried to make it seem like he loved us when he was parading us around in public. From the few fragments I can remember, my mother’s love wasn’t a lie, but I’ll never really know since I was six when she died. My whole life, I’ve just wanted someone to truly love me.

The spark on the lighter flares next to me as Kol lights a joint. We’re out by the pond where he likes to hang out whenever he’s brooding. Since he’s in as shitty a mood these days as I am, when he invited me to join him, I accepted.

Today is a shit day for more reasons than just my failed relationship.

Kol takes a pull and holds the smoke in his lungs for a beat before exhaling a puff.

“Pass it over,” I say.

He takes another hit before passing it over. God knows he has more to forget than I do today.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No.”

“Fair enough.”

The last thing I want to hear from any of my brothers is “I told you so,” even if they have every right to say it. They were all skeptical of Maude when I first started dating her, but I insisted they were wrong. I’ve had a lifetime of them protecting me, as if they knew what was best for me. I’m surprised Asher didn’t already tell both Kol and Sid what his PI found.

I offer Kol the joint, and we sit in silence. I’m sure we’re both thinking about the women wreaking havoc in our lives—Maude for me and his ex-fiancée who he just kidnapped for him. But then there’s what happened twenty years ago that’s weighing on us.

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