Page 31 of The Oath We Give

“You’re gonna get married, then? Hire a fake wife?”

“I told my dad I have a girlfriend.”

Not my proudest moment or smartest. But I needed him to give me time, and he wasn’t going to do that unless I gave him some hope I would actually marry for love.

I did what I had to do. I always do.

“Silas, I mean this with love,” Rook says, face the picture of confusion, “but what the fuck?”

He’s going to be the one with the biggest problem. Me marrying someone for convenience. It’ll drive him insane. ’Cause even though two nights ago, I watched him force a man to swallow a bottle of medicine and proceed to push him off a bridge into icy water because he’d attempted to drug his girlfriend, Rook’s heart is gentle.

All he has ever wanted since the moment I lost Rosemary was for me to be happy. I won’t ever be angry at him for that, for how protective he is over me, even if his constant worry about me taking medicine annoys the shit out of me.

Telling him should be easier, but it’s because he’s so protective that it isn’t.

“I’ll figure it out” is all I can say.

I will figure it out, eventually. But right now? I have no fucking clue what I’m going to do.

“Great.” Thatcher claps his hands together. “’Cause there is something more important than your impending nuptials. Stephen Sinclair is out of prison and blackmailing us. What are we doing about that problem?”

“You’re not even in the video, dickhead. You’d probably get off with a warning,” Rook grunts, reaching into his front pocket to pull out a pre-rolled blunt. “How’d he even get out?”

“Help. That’s what the prison informed me when I called to make sure he was the only inmate to escape.”

The sound of a lighter flicking echoes just before a cloud of smoke wraps around Rook’s head.

“Gotta make sure Daddy stays locked up,” he mutters, inhaling deeply.

“We can’t just wait for Silas to track the email. We have to move,” Alistair points out. “If it’s Stephen, we don’t know where he is. If it’s someone else, we are just as fucked.”

My head pounds with building pressure.

The guilt I carry is a relentless companion, a shadow that follows me everywhere I go. It’s the hollow pit of my stomach, a constant reminder that I’ve put these three people and the ones they love at risk.

My anger and desperation for revenge has once again uprooted their lives. If something happens, if we go to jail or someone dies, it’s on me. It’ll be my fault, and it’s a burden that has sat with me.

The selfishness of my grief will be the damnation of them.

“I’m sorry,” I say, not sure how to take it back or say it much better than that.

“For what?”

Rook’s eyebrows twitch together, the whites of his eyes turning pink from the weed.

“This is on me.” I shove my hands into my front pockets, looking up at the leaking sky. “You guys coming back. The blackmail. All of it. It’s on me. I couldn’t let Rosemary’s death go, needed to have revenge. You don’t—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Alistair’s force rumbles with the thunder in the distance. “There wasn’t a gun to my head. We all knew what we signed on for, and I’d do it again. You’re not the only one who wanted this. We all wanted to take a bite out of this place.”

“We started it together. We end it together,” Rook adds. “We’ll finish this and leave this fucking hellhole behind. All of us.”

“That means we have to follow the only trail we have right now,” Thatcher mutters. “And Rook isn’t going to like it.”

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EIGHT

VOICE IN THE CANVAS

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