Page 238 of Deceit

“Do you see any fucking?” She gestures behind her to Alaric and me on the couch. “You goofball.”

“It’s your man I don’t trust.” My brows knit when Emmy steals a glance at me, her lips smirked and she gives me a wink.

Of course, I’m always the bad guy and will continue to play it so why wouldn’t she use it to her advantage the little shit.

“Kyson is coming by to grab that will,” Mills announces. “I’m ordering pizza y’all stayin’, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Put pineapple on Emmy’s side.”

“No!” She looks at me like I just told him to assassinate a bunch of puppies. “That’s unAmerican as fuck.”

“Who the hell said that?” Mills retorts like she’s crazy.

She is crazy.

It’s not a life-or-death situation to put fruit on pizza. But Emmy won’t touch the shit if she sees it and she could be starving.

“Take a poll, Mills,” Emmy counters. “You know what I like.” My alpha male, don’t-look-at-my-shit persona begins to come out but I shove it back down to play nice.

That and I have a two-month-old in my arms.

The only thing Mills needs to know about my girl is that she doesn’t like pineapple on her pizza and loathes mayo—which he still purposely puts on her sandwiches when he wants to be a dick.

Mills comes to stand in front of me and holds out his arms before wiggling his fingers. “Come to Uncle Mills,” he sing-songs. “I know you missed me.”

“He didn’t,” I retort. “And fuck off.”

“The possessive father doesn’t trump the uncle, Bish. Keep up, old man.”

“I’m thirty-three.” Mills makes an exaggerated smile like he doesn’t want to break my heart and confess that it’s the new eighty. “And you’re bugging me, get fucked.”

Mills slowly glances over at Emmy going through her phone and my heel comes up to strike him right in the shin.

“Fuck,” he roars, hopping on his good leg.

“What happened?” Emmy strides over to the both of us and we both reply with “nothing”.

She steers her gaze back and forth, clearly aware we’re not gonna rat the other out for childish shit, and goes back to where she came.

“How is she?” Emmy’s fake baby daddy mutters before plopping down next to me on the couch.

“Shitty. Sometimes I think she’s about to break but she always holds on.”

“The kids.“ Mills pulls out his cell to make it look like we’re not talking about anything serious—I never said he was stupid—and mindlessly plays Candy Crush. “She’s afraid that she’s going to let the kids down.”

“Should we let her do this? Should we just handle this ourselves? I don’t know what’s right anymore.”

“She’d be pissed but she’d obviously get over it. She might need the closure though.”

I watch Emmy pour herself a glass of lemonade. “Killing the parent of her—“

“That ship sailed a long time ago,” Mills retorts. “I was there when she named them. How effortlessly it was. She named that kid in your arms after the love of her life. The father of her children. Fuck a DNA test.”

“We can’t hide that forever.” I squeeze Alaric closer to me, fear of him hating me down the road a definite possibility in the grand scheme of things.

What do I do, wait for him to be eighteen and spring it on him? Do we wait for him to ask? Do we tell him he died or that we really did murder him because the latter is fucked up and then what will he think of me?

“If my dad tried to kill my mom, I’d fucking hate him. There would be no thinking about it for me. Just don’t be a dick.”

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