Page 60 of Merciless King

After I’d dropped London off, I’d gone to work and buried myself in paperwork. When I’d finally forced myself to go home, the place had felt so quiet I couldn’t stand it. I could still smell her, her soap, her perfume, in my apartment, and I’d had to get the hell out. I’d ended up here.

But still London filled my head, and every time I thought about our goodbye, the way she’d shuddered against me, crying out, the way she’d held me and I’d held her, I wanted to throw my bottle across the room. Which meant the urge was pretty much constant.

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,” Hunter said into the silence, pulling me from my thoughts.

“That so?” When Hunter said no more, I raised a brow. “You going to enlighten me?”

Hunter held my stare, something in his eyes I’d never seen before, and I knew whatever was coming, I didn’t want to hear. “You think you deserve to be miserable. You don’t think you deserve her.”

I barely stopped myself from flinching, because, yeah, that was way too close to the truth for comfort. “London’s been through enough already. It’s better this way. She should be with someone who can give her everything. Someone that can give her what you give Lulu. That’s not me.”

She needed someone who wasn’t fucked up beyond repair, someone capable of loving her like she deserved.

Hunter shook his head. “This is about our piece of shit father, about Mom. You know that, right?”

I stiffened. We never talked about that. About them.

Hunter and I had different fathers. My brother’s biological father wasn’t the man who raised us. He was the piece of shit who attacked our mother on her way home from work, a man who beat and raped her. And my father made sure Hunter knew he wasn’t his. The fucker had hated Hunter from the moment he was born. And he’d been angry that our mother refused to get rid of him.

He’d taken that anger out on all of us.

“I know you blame yourself or feel guilt or fuck knows for what happened to us, but, brother, there’s nothing you could have done.”

My eyes slid to Hunter’s forearms, pitted with scars from cigarette burns. He had a lot of scars from that time. A hell of a lot more than me.

My throat grew tight. “You and Mom got the worst of it, and I should have—”

“There was nothing you could’ve done,” Hunter said.

My fingers curled into a tight fist. “I should have fought harder, I should have—”

“Fucking stop it, Van. I know what it is to feel that kind of guilt. I felt that way after I found out what happened to Lulu. That shit nearly fucking ate me alive. I hated myself for not being there to protect her.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” I said.

“You’re right.” Hunter fisted his beer tighter. “That doesn’t change the way I feel. That I let her down. But I know that’s my head messing with me. It’s not truth. You feel that about Mom and me. But, Van, you were a kid. You were being abused as well. You need to get it into your head that there was nothing, not one thing, you could have done.”

My gut knotted, twisted so tight I felt ill.

Hunter shook his head. “You think you don’t deserve happiness, and because of that, you’ll let it walk away. You’ll let her walk away.”

“You don’t understand,” I bit out.

“I understand, more than most. Brother, you have two choices. You can let the anger that you’re carrying around inside you win, or you can fight it. I’d carried that same anger and hate inside me for so damn long. And then I got Lulu back, and Josh, and they showed me what it was to truly be loved. They gave me a reason to fight.”

Everything he was saying felt like a gut punch.

“I don’t know if your reason is London, but you need to find it, and when you do, you need to hold the fuck on before that anger drowns you.”

Raul slid into the seat beside Hunter and gave me a hard stare. “Hunt’s right. You’ve been hiding behind that armor of yours since you were a kid. You need to let someone in. Don’t end up like me, son. Fay and I lost a lot of time wallowing in our own guilt, when we could have been together. Find your reason to fight.”

I dipped my chin, because I knew they both meant well. But there was nothing they could do to help me.

Because my reason to fight was out of reach.

And there was not one thing I could do to get her back.

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