Page 59 of Beautiful Liar

“I don’t know. It was arranged. He was meant for Imogen and he and I, we have history. I couldn’t let her marry him.”

“Because you love him.” I steered.

“I think maybe I could love him. One day. But now it’s just an arrangement.”

“Does he see it as just an arrangement?”

Maddox chuckled. “No. Enzo says he’s loved me since he met me.”

“When was that?”

“I was about sixteen when we met. I knew I was bi when I met him. So fucking weird. We got each other off a few times.”

I sucked in too hard and coughed. “At sixteen? Wasn’t he like old?”

Maddox shrugged. “I didn’t care. Neither did he.”

My stomach tightened even more. “He was what?” I did the math in my head. “He was twenty-six.”

Maddox bit his bottom lip. “Yeah.” He seemed to weigh that in his head. “Nothing really happened. Shit didn’t work out. Too much happening with the family.”

The timeline when Enzo met me lined up. It’d been after he met Maddox. It had to be that he knew who I was. He knew about me and Maddox being brothers. It had to. “Did he work with Cillian?”

“No,” Maddox said. “He was closer to my mother. She played in the symphony, loved music. It’s what we shared.”

I swallowed the lump. Had it been his mother who sold me out? “What instrument did you play?”

“Everything, but I loved the piano. I was fucking good at it too.”

I felt sick.

He chose you because he wanted you to be Maddox.

My whole life hadn’t been my own. I’d been a pawn in a game that centered around Maddox. In my mind, I knew it wasn’t his fault. But my heart hated him for it.

“Why do you call him Enzo?”

A boyish blush peppered his face. “It’s what I called him when we hooked up. He looked more like an Enzo than an Alessandro to me. Something just between us.”

Yeah. I had to fucking go. I inhaled the last hit. It muted my senses which I so fucking needed. I put it out on the concrete wall and shoved the bud into my pocket. “I’m heading out.”

“Tomás, Tristan knows about you.”

My chest felt about to implode.

“I want the others to know too.”

I wiped my face. I wanted to argue. Hell, if it’d been a few months ago before Alessandro, I probably would have. But all I kept thinking was that I only had tomorrow left. “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat and walking away. “After the games,” I added over my shoulder.

I lifted my hood and shoved my hands in my pockets. I meant to go to Harper House, but I ended up at Arcas. It was empty with everyone still at the party. I punched in the code andlet myself inside.

The first time Maddox had showed me this place I had thought it grand. A fancy house in the middle of the woods. A school that housed killers. Shit, I’d made friends here. Dasher would be protected. But Charity, Morgan, and Micah wouldn’t. And despite their training, Fox, Wren, and River weren’t infallible. They could get hurt too. We had to stick together. Survive with all our bits intact.

I made my way to the gym. It was the largest space in the house. A full weightlifting regimen, treadmills, stationary bikes, and a sparring area. The guys took their training to a whole new level. All types of blunt weapons were scattered near the wall—wooden swords and small bats. I went through each one, testing the weight, the grip, ignoring the throb in my ribs from the beat down. When I finally found one that seemed to fit, I beat the fuck out of a wooden doll until my body became a throbbing vessel of pain. At least I could give Luca a fucking fight before he ended me. I didn’t have to go like a sacrificial lamb. Like the martyr everyone believed me to be.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

---