Page 7 of Hayes
Oh, fuck. The woman I kissed, the woman I nearly fucked against a tree, the woman I’m madly in love with, isn’t the woman I need to find.
Lilith is no one to me. She’s a distraction that will keep me from completing my mission. She’s an innocent who doesn’t belong in my world.
I have to stay away.
I can’t drag her down with me.
Lilith doesn’t deserve it.
I have to find Ruby, not Lilith. I have to let Lilith go, no matter how impossible that will be.
And then I look at Titus, and my heart sinks. He’s staring after Lilith with lust in his eyes. I know that gaze all too well because it was the gaze I had until I found out who she is.
“I’m going to make Lilith Hart the queen to my king. And I need your help,” Titus says.
My eyes stare into the darkness, and I don’t speak. What is there to say? He clearly didn’t see me with her. He doesn’t know I claimed her first. If either of us cares about her, then she doesn’t belong with either of us. The best way to keep her safe is to keep her away from me.
I don’t say any of those things. I can’t. I agreed to be his second, and I’m going to need his trust to protect those I care about. So I have no choice but to accept my fate.
Fate has always been cruel to me. It’s why I don’t let myself fall in love. And this feeling I have for Lilith, it can’t be love. It has to just be infatuation and lust, nothing more.
That’s a lie.
But I’ll keep lying to myself forever if I have to.
Fate has decided I should suffer for loving Lilith, for loving what’s not mine.
Chapter 3
Lilith
“Go to sleep,” I say, standing at the doorway to my sisters’ room. “I mean it. Don’t stay up all night watching movies, Kennedy.”
She just rolls her eyes at me. “It’s Saturday night. We have nowhere to be in the morning, so we can sleep in. It doesn’t matter if we stay up all night or not.”
Kennedy moves her blankets aside for Adeline to jump into bed with her, smiling in agreement.
I sigh. They have nowhere important to be tomorrow, but I do. Tomorrow our lives change forever. No more living in this shitty trailer with its busted furnace, leaky water heater, and flimsy siding the wind bursts through. No more scraping by for enough money to buy stale bread and canned soup. No more worrying.
Kennedy’s right though—there is no reason for them not to stay up all night being teenagers. At seventeen, Kennedy only has one more year left before initiation. I only have one year to prevent her from having to endure that fate.
Thankfully, Adeline, at only thirteen, has several years before she has to worry about the truth of the dangerous organization we belong to.
I flick off the lights to their room as the glow from Kennedy’s tablet fills the room.
“Thank you for letting me come with you tonight. I had fun dancing,” Kennedy says.
I nod.
I didn’t want to bring her, but she begged, and there was only so much I could do to keep her from coming. If I didn’t let her come, she’d only sneak in this time or the next.
“Come watch movies all night with us,” Kennedy says suddenly.
“Yea, there’s plenty of room for you, Mom,” Adeline says.
My heart seizes. She doesn’t call me mom often anymore, but every once in a while, Adeline slips even though we haven’t seen our real mom in weeks. She’s always working, doing whatever she can to bring us enough money to survive—including selling herself to men at night to keep the lights on here.
That level of desperation is something I’m going to put a stop to. Adeline deserves a chance to know our mother. I’m not a good replacement. Our mother is a saint. She’s kind and funny and warm. But after our father died, she threw herself into providing for us. She’s trying to get us out from underneath the Retribution Kings, but nothing she’s done has made a dent in the debts we owe them.
