Page 118 of Devilish Ink

Rian pushed himself up from the couch. He walked toward a desk at the back corner of the parlour and riffled through the contents. “Ry’s a big girl. I’m sure she can look after herself just fine.”

“Do you really see nothing?” I snapped.

Rian looked back at me in surprise from where he stood holding a bottle of whiskey.

“What?” He took a swig from the bottle then narrowed his eyes at me. “If this is some kind of trick to—”

“You have no clue what’s going on,” I hissed. “Do you?”

My chest heaved, my vision going unsteady. How could he be so blind?

At the first glance I could tell something was haunting Ryleigh.

How couldhenot see it?

I wanted to hit him. To smack him until he saw sense.

I strode across the tattoo shop towards him. “You’ve been so obsessed with your hurt, with your pain, little brother, that you’ve blinded yourself completely to anyone else’s. You think you’re the only one in the world to suffer? The only one in the world to be scared of the dark?”

“I think you need to leave,” he said in a low, dangerous tone ashe stalked toward me. “Right fucking now, Liam, before this turns bloody.”

“Do you know she has nightmares?” I said, as his chest butted against mine, a physical fight on the brink. “Do you know she screams herself hoarse in the middle of the night?”

This wasn’t how I wanted this conversation to go. I wanted an ally and I was making an enemy instead.

But I was so afraid for Ry.

“Do you really believe she left you all those years ago to ‘see the fucking world’? Are you really thatself-centreed? That clueless?”

I was being selfish. I knew that. I was using Ry to hurt Rian.

But he needed tosee. I needed to scare him into protecting Ry while I was gone. I needed someone else in Dublin tocare.

Because as much as I told myself all that Ryleigh needed was me, she needed afamily,too.

She needed Rian.

“There’s someone after her.”

Rian blinked at me, stunned into silence.

My heart pounded, blood rushing against my ears, breath panting like a rabid dog. “She’s in danger. She’s been in danger ever since she ran five years ago. She hasn’t had a moment of peace all this time. All this time you thought she’s been having a party on some goddamn tour bus. She’s been running scared. She’s beenalone.”

The bottle fell from Rian’s limp fingers. It rolled across the rug, whiskey pouring from the open top before it thudded to a stop against the leg of the couch.

“She would have told me,” Rian said, but there was little conviction in his voice.

He stared past me, his gaze somewhere far away from Dublin Ink. Was he seeing that night she left? Was he replaying their conversations on the phone all those years? Was he trying to find the moments he missed?

“She… She would have told me.” Rian shook his head and looked at me with a raw pain in his eyes. “Why wouldn’t she have told me?”

It was the most I’d felt like Rian’s older brother in a long time. He was looking to me for answers the way a little brother should.

“Sometimes,” I said slowly, “sometimes people don’t reveal a hard, painful truth if…”

I sucked in a breath and exhaled through my nose.

I’d opened up to him, told him the truth I’d kept like a knife in my heart for my whole life. And he rejected me. He called me a liar. He swore my truth couldn’t be the truth, or at least not his. Never his.

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