Page 139 of Give Me Redemption

He rubs his chin and takes another drink. “You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?”

“No.” The lie slips past my lips easily, and I don’t know why I even said it. I should tell him yes. I should tell him that I’m not going to stop, and he can kiss my ass if he has a problem with it.

He smirks in disgust and shakes his head in disbelief. “You’re so goddamn disappointing.”

I stand up quicker than the words came out of his mouth. “Disappointing?” I seethe. “No, what’s disappointing is when your brother tells you he’ll never leave, but what do you do the first chance you get? You fucking leave. You stayed drunk while youwerethere, just likehimand then you abandoned me, just likeher.”

He wants to sit here and throw stones at me? I have plenty of those motherfuckers. He has no right to judge me. The man has been messed up his whole life. Not wanting to get too close to anyone because of our parents. Hiding away in his apartment and club every night because he was too afraid to feel. And the way he acted when we were kids?

Yeah, fuck him and his stones.

It’s past three in the morning when I hear the commotion downstairs. I move my covers off and open my bedroom door.

Walking down the hall, I look down over the banister. Emily stands over Bryce as he throws up into the trash can at the bottom of the stairs. She rubs his back.

“You have to stop this,” she says. “Your Pops isn’t going to put up with it, Bryson.”

He leans back and laughs. “I don’t give a shit.”

“You don’t mean that,” she throws back. “You boys are going to be the death of me. Do you know what I went through with Lee? He was a drunk in a dark place. I helped him come out of it, but he had to want to. You’re too young for this. You have everything going for you.”

“Like what?” He spits into the trash. “I lost everything.”

“Maybe you lost a lot, but you didn’t lose everything.”

He leans his head against the wall. “Then why do I feel like I did?” My brother’s shoulders start to shake. I move back, heading to my room.

He still has me, but he’s so focused on the people we no longer have. The person who gave us up. Why can’t he be happy?

Bryce stands up, too. “I’m not your fucking parent. I was a kid, too!” he yells.

“You were my older brother. You were all I had, and you left me alone.”

“You act like Pops and Emily weren’t good to be left with.”

“That’s not the point.” I jab my finger at him. “You were my family.”

He sat down at the bottom of those steps and said he lost everything.

He still had a brother.

I’m the one who lost everything.

“Jace, I had to go and do my own thing. I had to make something of myself,” he says.

But I’m not just talking about his precious club. I’m talking about everything after we lost our parents. How he shut down, how he drank himself stupid. But I’m not diving more into that. I’m trying to move on. I know it was a long time ago. I know he was just a kid who was messed up and didn’t know how to act.

I’m not going to plunge deeper into it, but I’m also not going to let him stand here and point fingers at me, like I’m the only one who screws up.

“Oh, and you did a great job. Turned your club basement into an illegal gambling operation, and then you did an even better job by getting mixed up with murderers.” Danny O’Brien is a psychopath who kills people and gets away with it. Bryce should never have gotten mixed up with him. But I suppose if he didn’t, he’d be sitting in prison right now.

Silver linings.

I reach down and scoop up my smokes, hitting them onto my palm before sliding one out and putting it between my lips.

Smoke drifts into the apartment, and I fold back into the chair. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here before we say any more shit we’ll regret?”

Bryce looks down at the floor, his mind clearly spinning. I fucking hate fighting with him. My heart is fickle when it comes to my brother. I love the man, but he gets under my skin like no one else.

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