Page 20 of Wicked Rivals

“Why are you here?” Val asked again, a touch more stability in her tone.

I cut my gaze away from the boy and fixed it on her.

“You tell me,” I said coldly. “Why would I be here after nearly a fucking decade? What could have possibly brought me across the bridge to this shithole neighborhood again?”

I moved toward her, and she instinctively stepped back, taking the boy with her.

My presence terrified her. Yet another knife in my back.

It had taken me months to stop seeing the horror on her face when she discovered my real name. And there I stood, seeing it again as if no time had passed, and I hated it.

It was probably for the best.

She should be afraid. I was a dangerous man, and she had crossed me in the worst way imaginable.

As the boy struggled to get between his mother and me again, his hands balled into fists, and he scowled.

A mirror image of me again.

“Leave now,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but we don’t want you here, and you can’t talk to my mother like that.”

“I believe I just did,” I countered.

Pride welled within me, conflicting with my anger.

Pride caused by the sight of my son filled with such brazen courage and certainty in his role as man of the house. A certainty I would have to break all too soon, because it was the only way to keep him safe now that his mother’s way had failed.

“And I have every right to speak to her however I choose,” I added while staring into her eyes.

“You absolutely do not,” Val said.

Hm. She’d recovered some of her own courage, or maybe she realized my men and I weren’t there to harm her or the child. Whatever the cause of her fortitude, it wouldn’t last long.

Not once we had the conversation I planned to have.

“Tony, Bruce.” I jerked my chin at the door without taking my eyes off her. “Get out.”

“Yes, sir.”

The acknowledgement came from both men at the same time as they left us. Neither one needed to be told I wanted them to watch the building from the outside, effectively leaving me alone with a broken version of the family I once wanted.

The door closed behind them with a tinny jingle of the bell hanging from the top of the frame.

“You owe me a new lock,” Val said.

I tilted my head. “You owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing!” she spat.

If that was how she wanted to have the conversation, fine.

My gaze drifted to the coffee table in front of that damn couch by that fucking window, then I headed that way, my shoes clicking across the wood floor.

“Who’s his father, Val?”

“A soldier,” she snapped. “Killed in Iraq before we?—”

“Liar.”

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