Page 34 of Banshee
She looked up at me, her eyes filled with defeat. “I know. It’s why I wouldn’t let the people who helped me escape from the hospital, fake my death. I’d thought about it though. I couldn’t do that to my mother.”
“You’re not selfish.” I looked over my shoulder. “Not like that asshole in there.”
“He’s not an asshole.”
That was when I heard it. The wistful tone of her voice, the tiny sparkle in her eye that shone like a star in the sky. She was in love with him. I wondered if she always had been.
“I need you to stay here. Stay hidden just a little longer.”
She huffed out a sigh, and I smiled. She’d always been so full of sass. Then one day it was just gone. Then she was gone.
“Please.”
“If he finds me—”
“I won’t let him find you.” I put a finger under her chin and lifted her face. I stepped closer and dipped my head to look intoher eyes. God, I wanted to kiss her. But she wasn’t mine. She never would be.
Dead men didn’t get their happy ever after.
“Go back inside before he comes out looking for you.”
She wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me. I took advantage of having her in my arms just this once and kissed the top of her head.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” she whispered and then disappeared inside.
“Hey, jackass, are you listening to me?”
“No, I tune you out when you drone on. I know what the fuck I’m doing. She’ll stay put; you don’t have to worry about that. And she won’t tell anyone. Not even the asshole she’s shacked up with.”
My brother was quiet. He knew how I felt about the Silver Shadows. Knew I didn’t trust them.
“Did you find her yet?” I asked, changing the subject.
“No, but I’m close. I just need a little more time.”
“Don’t trust that son of a bitch who’s helping you.”
“You worried about me, baby brother?”
“You died once already, asshole. Don’t want you dying again.”
“Back at you, baby brother.”
The world should have known by now that it wasn’t easy to kill the bastard sons of a cult leader. We might not have God on our side... but then again, maybe we did. We’d both almost died. It was a miracle we both survived. Maybe that was a gift from God, because neither Justin nor I ever gave in to the shit our father spewed.
A true man of God wouldn’t be spreading his seed all over the country. There was no telling how many other children ourfather might have spawned. The only reason Justin and I knew each other was because our mothers were sisters.
I smiled in the darkness; he’d always called me baby brother. When we were kids, it was little brother. Until I grew bigger than him. He wasn’t a slouch by any means, but he spent more time behind a computer than he did in the gym.
“Just be careful and take everything he says with a grain of salt.”
“Listen, Sinclair’s an asshole, no doubt about that. But he’s got his reasons.”
“Fuck his reasons. He doesn’t get to be a dick because he’s looking for his kid. You gonna give that bitch a pass because her kids were stolen from her?”
“It’s not the same fucking thing, Jude.”
Now it was Jude. He only ever called me Jude when he was mad. “I’m just saying, losing a kid doesn’t give you the right to play with people’s lives. If he’d spoken up back then, we wouldn’t be dealing with this shit.”
