Page 33 of The Last Time You Break Me

“Lara.” Her name fell like a praise from my lips. The raw and husked sound of my tone, burned from the back of my throat thick with emotion that swelled.

“Don’t look at her, don’t you dare even talk to her!” Dalton sneered as he folded his arms across his chest in clear warning. His threat was idle, and didn’t unnerve me in the slightest

I ignored him, my focus only on her. As I implored her to not make this any harder than it already had to be. “You told me if I wanted you, I had to earn you. This is me earning you, troublemaker. No matter the cost, this is me putting it all on the line.”

She stared at me, unmoving. I shook my head, at a loss as to what more I could say or do for her to trust me.

“You said that to this prick? The prick that raised you like a niece and now wants to bump fucking uglies?” Dylan snapped as he pushed off from the staircase and prowled closer with violence in his eyes. “I’ll fucking kill you before I let you touch her, you fucking perv.”

I lunged at him, my beefy hand wrapped around his throat as I lifted him from his feet and slammed him flat on his back, down onto the ground. He smacked his shoulders off the floor, but I caught his head in my hand before I lowered itand tightened my hold around his throat, making sure he fully understood what the fuck I was saying.

“Listen to me, you little fucking shit. I know this is hard, confusing and whatever the fuck else comes with these emotions we have never before tested in such hot fucking waters, but here we are. We work through the emotion of all this shit, as a family. We talk about this shit, we don’t go around shouting out crap that would make any man who wasn’t you, lose his fucking tongue.”

He sneered up at me in disdain and I stepped back, leaving him spluttering heaving breaths on the ground below me just before Dalton and Dallas reached us and helped him back to his feet.

“Yes, I have always been your uncle. And yes I will always see you as nephews.You. Nother. I have never seen her that way. Not since she turned eighteen and I saw that fire in her eyes. The one that threatened to burn the world around her if it wasn’t tamed. I walked away, goddamnit. I walked away because I thought I was protecting her. And look at her now. She is a fucking queen within her own right and that pretty crown of hers is soaked in more blood than the three of you have drawn combined. She is the soul of this empire and one day, she will fucking rule it and do you know why?” I asked, wondering if any of them have ever thought about the day that she changed. About the day she let the good little daughter go and became this darkness that got the job done, no questions asked, no prisoners taken.

It was the day she found her mother’s head in a box. “She will rule this world because of spite. Because I told her no. Because I told her she wasn’t good enough. She bit the hand that fed her those lies and she rose in the fucking ashes. She has been falling into this darkness of blood and mutilation, putting herself in these reckless situations and instead of calling her on her shit,you guys laugh at it like it’s a joke. How long before one of those moves kills her? How long before you realize it isn’t me that’s the threat but your own inability to see her for who she truly is? A glorious fucking nightmare that will burn down within the flames if she doesn’t have someone to walk with her through them.”

“Do not take credit for who I am, Reggie. I became this in spite of you, not because of you. Quite frankly, I’ve lived four years without knowing your touch. Without feeling your love. I think I can live four more while you experience exactly what it is that I felt that day. You turned your back, remember? Now watch me do the same.” She did exactly that, she turned her back on me again as she headed back toward her room and left me to face her ruthless brothers alone.

Those words should have barbed me. They should have cut so fucking deep, blood seeping through my shirt. But they didn’t. I smirked instead, happy with the way I heard her voice tremble as it wavered.

And yet again, nobody could hear it but me.

“What the fuck are you smiling at, dick?” Dylan asked as he frowned at me.

“Hope. You should find it sometime, asshole.” I smiled back at him.

“Do you really love her?” Dallas asked.

“With the entirety of my bleak, dark and depraved, rock-hard heart, boys. Your sister has a way of setting the ice aflame.”

“She has a tendency to set everything in her vicinity aflame,” Dalton mumbled. “This… I don’t know how I feel about this.”

“That’s okay. I’m still trying to figure it out too. But you’ll always be my boys and I’ll always be the same old and grouchy bastard you’ve always loved and detested,” I jested as I swung my gaze back up toward the empty balcony.

I froze when I felt the butt of a gun against the back of my head, pushed firm into the back of my skull as it cocked, and I heard the clicking mechanism chirp in my ear. “Do you love her enough to take a bullet for her though, brother?” Dom’s voice whispered around me, low and deadly. I blinked then sighed as my shoulder deflated and the tension left me with the air I puffed out but remained hard and coiled around every muscle in my body.

My heart thrashed in my chest, as I clenched and unclenched my hands in frustration.

Tonight was a night full of fucking firsts.

I was not used to standing down. In restraining myself when the darkness calls.

I left the kid with his tongue and I was about the leave my best friend with his hand.

Life was full of surprises.

“Dom,” I growled, low and violent as it rasped out of me with a husked rumble. “Get the gun off my fucking head before I shove it so far up your ass it will give you flash backs of the Christmas party in 09.”

“Then answer my question. You love my daughter so much, would you die for her?”

It was a very simple answer. I could almost hear it echoing within the silence as a slow chant that filtered around me.

The answer was fucking easy.

“Yes.”

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