Page 21 of Beautiful Sinners

Tristan straightens up when I lower down and crawl into his lap, but he gathers me close, his strong arms clutching me to him. I hold him as tightly as I can until his breath shudders out and he burrows his head between my breasts.

I run my fingers through his hair and kiss any part of him my lips can touch.

“What can I do? How can I fix this?”

The songs of cicadas fill the air with ear-splitting intensity, their noisy racket drowning everything else out.

My eyelashes get caught in soft wisps of Tristan’s hair when they flutter up. Constantine and Hendrix have taken a seat on the top portico step, mirror images of one another with their elbows resting atop splayed knees. Even though they don’t show it outwardly, I can feel their distress from here as they look on.

“Please forgive me.”

Tristan’s head whips up so fast I flinch back to avoid getting knocked in the chin.

“You did nothing wrong, Aoife… Syn…fuck!” He lowers his forehead to my collarbone. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay if you want to call me Aoife. I just don’t like her very much right now. And, yes, I know how crazy that sounds since I’m her. It’s going to take a little time for me to get used to hearing it again. I kind of liked Syn.”

His mouth presses to the skin exposed by the collar of my shirt. “I liked Syn, too. I fell in love with her.”

He trails off, and I forget to breathe.He loves me?

The sudden influx of exhilarated happiness that fills me to bursting makes my chest hurt. Happiness is the last thing I should be feeling. I killed people today. It doesn’t matter if they would have done the same without a second thought, their blood still stains my hands. I’m a murderer who took the lives of men who had family and friends and someone out there who cared about them. And it scares me to realize how…detachedI feel about it. It’s fucked up. I should be sitting in a ten-by-ten concrete prison cell, not feeling ecstatic that both Constantine and Tristan have told me that they love me. Maybe I should be grateful for that part of Aoife that remains inside me, otherwise I’d still be curled in a fetal position on the floor upstairs.

But the woman I am now isn’t Aoife anymore. The ugly lessons that were ingrained into me as a child of the Society hold no power over the love, compassion, and kindness that Alana showed me every day for ten years.

I know the power I hold now. I was groomed to step into my father’s role in the Council. Maybe I can make a difference. Enact change.

Or maybe, I need to burn the entire organization to the ground. The roots of evil grow thick under the soil that the Society was built upon. Too many wealthy men in positions of power who abuse that power and everyone else around them.

“Syn?”

Tristan pulls me back from where my thoughts had led me, and I kiss his downturned lips. “Yeah?”

“How is she? Was she happy living on the farm?”

I soften at his questions. Tristan may be cocky and full of himself a lot of the time, but his heart is a good one. After everything he’s been through, he never lost his capacity to love.

I lean back a little in his arms, so I can touch the scar that slices through his eyebrow, then the small bump on the bridge of his nose where it was broken. The bump is familiar, a gift from his asshole father when he was nine, but the eyebrow scar is new, and I want to ask him how he got it.

“There was never a day where she didn’t smile. We would dance in the kitchen to the most horrible country music when we cooked. We laughed a lot. She beat me every time we played Trivial Pursuit.” I chuckle when I think about how she kisses Cocky Bastard’s beak every morning, thanking him for waking her up to enjoy another day. “She raises chickens and feeds the stray cats that wander onto our property. The small barn on the property is now a cat hotel. She likes sitting out on the back porch to watch the sunrise.”

A lone tear slips out, and I catch it with my thumb. Tristan may hate showing any weakness of any kind, but he lets me see his vulnerability.

“She was happy, Tristan. I don’t know why she never tried to contact you or why she told me that my name was Synthia and kept who I really was a secret.”

Or why she would encourage me to attend Darlington Founders when she must have known the guys were already there. It makes no sense.

The risks she took were enormous. The fabrications she wove and had me believe, fragile and on borrowed time. The psychiatrist, Dr. Westmore, who Alana made sure I saw every week for three years had said that I was repressing traumatic memories as a survival mechanism. During my regular office visits, Dr. Westmore threw words at me that I didn’t understand, like dissociative amnesia, state-dependent remembering, motivated forgetting, and retrieval inhibition. I had to Google that shit up. She said that when my mind was ready to deal with whatever happened to me, the memories would resurface.

Joke’s on her. I absolutelywas notready, but I’d walk through hell and make deals with the devil if it meant stopping Aleksei from shooting Constantine right in front of me.

“I think I know why,” he says so quietly that I almost don’t catch it.

“You do?”

“Do what?”

“Know why,” I reply.

---