Page 148 of Cruel Lies

They were smiling. Both of them. The teasing wasn’t erupting in a fight for once. It felt . . . lighter.

"Are neither of you mad at her?"

Angel and Nash exchanged a look that spoke volumes. "Why the fuck would we be?" Angel glanced downward, his hand lifting waveringly to rest on the thick bandage just below his neckline. "I took the bullet for her willingly. Nobody forced me to do it."

Nash chuckled from his position by the door. "And I couldn’t be more proud. Imagine, Rowan. She’s been having secret lessons right under our noses. And someone had to teach her how to hack the system, so your camera feeds almost missed a loop feed. And the way she flung that blade—if I really had been one of Father’s goons, she’d have taken him out in a single blow." He threw his hand over his heart and then winced at the jarring motion. "I think I’d marry her if I wasn’t so damn ugly."

"You’re fucked in the head," Angel muttered, chuckling under his breath.

"You’re pretty, bro. Why don’tyoumarry her, then?" He waggled his brows at Angel and laughed when our middle brother’s face grew redder than a whore’s lips. "Aww, someone’s shy."

"Get fucked," Angel spat, turning his nose up at Nash. "I’m supposed to be healing here."

"Oh, you’d be out of that bed in seconds if I told you Harper was just down the hall in my room."

Angel’s gaze darted to the door, and I watched his knuckles turn white as he gripped the rails of his bed. "Is she?"

"No, she’s not. Because this dolt—" he jerked his thumb at meand chuffed annoyingly "—chased her off. Said it wasall her faultand all that other shit."

"I told her the truth," I pleaded, but Angel and Nash were having none of it.

"What the fuck did you tell her, Rowan?" Angel looked ready to murder, and were he in slightly better shape, the look in his eyes would worry me.

"I told her that things would have been better if she’d never come along."

I barely whispered the words, but Angel heard them just fine in the quiet of the room.

And then, he did something I never thought I’d ever see him do in his entire life.

A stray tear trailed down his cheek as he stared into my soul, the sadness in his eyes too much to take. "Ro," he muttered, the words laced with seven years of pain. "Surely you don’t believe that."

"We were fine without her," I pointed out. "We had our job, our lives were steady, and we were all doing just fine?—"

"Nash and I were ready to kill each other, he had a drinking problem, and you were on the fast track to burnout." His words hit their intended mark, and I physically recoiled as each allegation hit me square in the heart. "We were falling apart, and you were desperately trying to hold us together and protect us from a boogeyman Nash and I stopped fearing a long time ago."

"You stopped needing my protection a long ass time ago and still let me go on thinking you needed to be sheltered from the world."

Angel’s stare hardened, and I saw the man he’d once been shift to make room for a man I’d become intimately familiar with. "You’re lashing out at her because you can’t bring yourself to look inward. You’re afraid it was your fault we ended up where we are. Because of what you did for her?—"

"Fuck you both, right up the ass," I spat, unableto bring myself to stay calm any longer. They were right, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to sit here and take this from two invalids who’d given their whole lives for a woman who’d walked out just because someone said some mean words to her?—

. . . if you’d never come along . . .

I stood from my chair, uncaring as it clanged to the floor in my haste. I was mid-epiphany, and if I didn’t move fast, I might lose the only chance I had left to fix the mistakes I’d made.

"Try the bridge," Angel offered helpfully as I rushed from his room, on autopilot all the way to the parking garage.

It was all your fault . . .

Her fault, my fault, none of us were at fault here. A man who’d been pulling the strings for far too long, controlled me like a puppet for a lifetime through my devotion to my brothers, was still warping my mind and damaging the good things I had. His hollow words, his menacing threat to take everything that I loved from me, rang in my ears as surely as my own did.

You’re still just a stubborn, selfish, spoiled brat . . .

You’re the whole reason any of this happened.

Sure, maybe she was. As the speedometer cranked higher, passing one-twenty like it was sitting still, I realized it didn’t matter if she’d been the catalyst. You couldn’t fight destiny. And fate had been trying to redirect us together at every turn.

If she wasn’t meant for us, then who was?

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