Page 226 of Deceit

Plus, I’m pissed.

Everything that’s going on is hard to handle. Typically when we have a problem, we obliterate it and move on our way, but there are babies involved and they’re not just any kids.

They’re the love of my life’s children.

Ones I’ve held and quickly bonded with. Atlas and Alaric are Emmy, tiny remnants of her DNA and heart.

And I’m a fucking wreck for everything Emmy has dealt with because I don’t want her to turn cold like me.

If she pushed me away, I’d follow her.

If she demanded that she want to do this—raise her children independently without any involvement from me or B723, I wouldn’t listen.

I respect Emmy but not her independence to shut me out when a darkness is beginning to form that I know all too well.

I’m not strong enough to not fall down in the deep end with her if she drowns because she only needs to say the word, and I’ll eliminate him and everyone he knows.

I don’t want to push but I’m worried about how she’s handling it.

At the coffee shop, she appeared distant. No longer did she smile or have that glimmer of happiness in her brown eyes after speaking with her douchebag ex.

They were dead and dark.

And while she runs around and plays Robin to someone else’s Batman, I sat back and watch her blow off steam to manage whatever is going on in her head.

Except for when I couldn’t take it anymore.

I can’t do a fucking thing without thinking of her. And I can’t stand when she’s not talking to me.

It irks me to no fucking end.

In the hotel room that Emmy booked for us, she doesn’t say a word the whole twenty minutes back from the bar. She didn’t bitch at me for carrying her out like a caveman and she didn’t complain when I buckled her in like she couldn’t do it her damn self.

Tossing her purse on one of the white sectional couches, she begins going through her cell and brings it to her ear.

I allow my eyes to soak in the emerald green dress that hugs her perfect ass and how she stretches on her tiptoes to stretch. She rubs at one of her temples, looking clearly distressed until someone answers the phone on the other line.

“Hey,” she greets with a beaming smile and tone. “Sorry, I’m late.”

She’s forgotten or doesn’t care that I’m in the room, which doesn’t bother me as she paces the front of the couch.

It gives me a minute to evaluate her behavior and body language.

“It got messy, but I’m fine,” she recites, raking her hand through her short hair. “I know, I’m…figuring it out.”

Emmy blows out a breath, hollowing out her cheeks as she rights herself and straightens her spine against whatever or whoever she’s arguing with.

I want to pluck her cell out of her hands and crush it under my heel, but I’m trying to give her that said space she needs.

It’s what I’d want.

Studying her and recalling everything that’s happened in the last two months, I know that I’m hers in every sense of the word.

Everything that is me—dark, deep, and fucked up—is Emmy’s.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Emmy conveys, then pulls her phone from her face and glances down at it. She suddenly glows, lips curled in the most enthusiastic smile as she waves her fingers at the screen. And I know she’s video chatting with her kids. “Oh, my sweetheart, hello!”

A cooing sounds in the room and then Mill’s voice. “All she does is eat, Ems. The woman acts like she doesn’t every two minutes.”

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