by H. M. Ward
Sean doesn’t wait for an invitation and slams into the door, forcing it all the way open and walks inside the dark room. I follow, blasted by the stench of must covered with bleach. The door slams shut behind me, and although the room is pitch-black, I can make out Peter’s face from a thin slit of light shining through the curtains. He’s still wearing his tux pants and the dress shirt. He hasn't changed, but he lost the tie and the jacket. He’s disheveled, his hair rumpled as if he’s been tugging it frantically.
Peter growls at his brother, “What the fuck, Sean? You said you’d take care of her.”
“I did. If I didn’t bring her here, someone else would have.”
Peter shoves Sean in the chest, making him take a step back to right himself. “Bullshit!” Peter hisses, “You were supposed to keep her safe. You fucking killed her!” Peter balls his hand into a fist and takes a swing, but Sean raises his arm and blocks him.
“Stop it. You damn well know Sidney would have found you by any means possible. She would have walked up to that asshole, and God knows what would have happened. She’s not exactly stealthy, Pete.”
“Hey,” I object, shoving between them. Peter is still livid, but he turns away as soon as I’m within reach.
Sean shoots me a look that says REALLY? Then he continues, speaking in a low, sharp voice. “She knows about Gina, which means she could have pulled his name. What the hell were you thinking, telling her all that shit? I had no idea you were so foolish.”
Peter’s brow is creased as he stares at the wall. “I didn’t think it would come to this.”
“No one ever does.” Sean’s voice is even, tense. He steps toward his brother. “I’m tracking down Jon. Mother already knows. We’ll handle this. In the meantime, stay out of sight, so you don’t end up at the bottom of the East River, got it? And for God’s sake, keep her with you. The last thing we need is Sidney poking around. She’s a fucking target, walking around, knowing half the story. Tell her the rest or I will.”
What’s he talking about? I know the whole story. I glance at Peter and realize Sean is telling the truth. I’m missing information, and, from the look on Peter’s face, it’s something bad. “Peter?”
Sean stands there as if Peter will spill it all right this second, but he doesn’t speak. Sean is beyond livid, and when his eyes cut over to me, I flinch. There’s nothing but cold darkness in his gaze. It’s like I’m looking into the eyes of a heartless monster. I turn my face away, staring at the brown shag carpet.
Sean growls, “Sidney, remember what I told you. Now is the time you decide—in or out. If you want out, I’ll make it clear the Ferro family has nothing to do with you, no ties so that they won’t come after your family. It’ll be very public and very ugly, but it’ll do the job. It’ll keep Luke away from you and the asswipe who is after Peter. If you stay, you’re all in. There’s no going back. I’ll make sure Sam and your father are protected until this ends.”
“Is Luke really that much of a problem?”
Sean narrows his gaze at me and folds his arms over his chest. “He’s trying to kill your fiancé, so yes—Luke is a problem. We’ll have to deal with him another time. Tinfoil hat or not, the man shows no mercy. Are you willing to take down a Ferro and a thug to protect, Pete?”
There’s a roar in my ears as I stand there in a torn wedding dress and Peter’s leather jacket in a stunned silence.
“What’s your decision?” Sean asks tersely.
I never thought this would be my life. I’m not a fighter. I didn’t protect myself early on, and it led me here. Peter means everything to me, but I don’t want to be a liability.
I say as much, plainly. “I’m in, but I need you to help me not be a weak spot. I won’t be the reason something horrible happens to Peter.”
“No,” Peter rounds on me and screams the word, his hand flying in a gesture that means there’s no way in hell he’s letting me stay. “Walk away, Sidney. This shitstorm is snowballing. It’s one thing today—”
“Two things,” Sean corrects.
Peter sighs and shoots his brother a sharp glance. “My point is that this never ends. Leave and don’t look back.”
“No.” I frown and get in his face. “I can’t, even if I wanted to. I’ll wonder about you every day for the rest of my life. I finally found my strength again, and it’s you. I can’t leave you behind! It’d be like cutting off my head.”
Peter’s beautiful face creases with worry. I feel his warm breath as he speaks. “If you stay, that’s a possibility, not just a metaphor. You’re not strong enough for this, Sidney. You weren’t made for this.”
“Neither were you. Life happens, and what matters is how you react when it does. I’m not leaving. Marry me or not, hate me or not—I can’t leave you.”
His hands find my shoulders, and he leans his forehead to mine. “Please,” he begs, “Please leave with Sean and separate yourself from us. I thought this was over. I thought the different life, the different name would protect us, but I was wrong. I’m a Ferro, Sid. I’ll always be caught up in nasty stuff that I don’t want you exposed to—please…”
“No.” There’s a tremor in my voice, and I want to cry. He ran to protect me, but I worry he’ll sacrifice himself if he thinks it will make things better for everyone else. Peter has always been clear that he didn’t want this life. No matter how hard he tried to get away from it, it comes back and tries to pull him back into the fold. There’s no escape.
“Then tell me truly, look at my brother and tell me he doesn’t frighten you—that he doesn’t disgust you. There’s blood on his hands, more than mine. We’re mirror images of each other, Sid. There’s a reason why people say we’re twins, and it’s not just our looks—our temperaments are short, our fights are bloody, and our desire to protect our own trumps everything. We’re the same, Sidney. Having a heart is a luxury that will destroy me and you.”
I take his face in my hands and speak softly. “Not having a heart will destroy you faster. Giving into the sheer hopelessness of it all will consume you, and there will be no escape from it because you'll have barricaded your heart and thrown love away. If there’s one thing that could save you, shouldn’t you keep it? If there were one thing that could give hope where there is none, wouldn’t you want it? A life without purpose isn’t what you want. You’re not a vigilante, Peter. You’ve always been a poet and, no matter how hard you try to hide your heart, it will always break through. That’s who you are, and as long as you live and breathe, you’ll regret and mourn the life you could have had.” There are tears in my eyes as I watch his blue gaze. Those eyes are so much like his brother’s, but different. They offer mercy and compassion freely. They want to see the good in the world, even if there isn’t any left.
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
“No.” I laugh sadly, still holding his face to mine. “I won’t leave you, so please stop trying to walk away.”
Peter wraps his arms around my middle, and I lace my arms around his neck. He holds me tightly and presses a brief kiss to my lips. I feel the blush rise on my cheeks, not wanting to have Sean watch our display of affection. When we look up, Sean is gone.
CHAPTER 8
Peter feels distant and, even though he’s welcomed me to stay, I feel the fear radiating off of him. He’ll blame himself if something happens to me. He won’t come back from it. As it is, he’s fighting a battle I can't see, waging a war between the man he wants to be and the fighter that tries to resurface at times like this. There’s no balance with him. Peter seems to be all fighter or all poet. The two don’t coexist for him, and I can’t help but wonder why. I follow after him in my ruined wedding gown with his biker jacket still on and pull the front tight, wrapping it around me and tugging hard.
I want to say that I don’t understand, but I do. The silent clacking of bear claws follows me on a daily basis. For years, I tried to act like it never happened, that Dean didn’t traumatize me. I wanted to recover fully, and, to me, that
meant wiping away the past like it never happened. I wanted a clean slate, but that’s not possible. Those days will always be there, carried around for the rest of my life as scars on my soul. I’ve thought of those markings as something that makes me weak, but lately I don’t know.
Maybe Peter is fighting the same battle. He’s tried to walk away from me before, and I know this has to be horrible for him. The fact that he can’t embrace the fighter must be a hindrance. He has untapped power, but releasing it will mean going back on everything he promised Gina, on everything he promised me—and himself. Peter sits down hard on the edge of the bed, places his elbows on his knees, and leans forward. His gaze is conflicted, shifting between an icy stare and a warm caress.
I choose my seat carefully, stopping in front of him before lowering myself to my knees. I sit back on my boots and look up into his beautiful face. Stubble dusts his jaw as it does at the end of every day. His shirtsleeves are pushed up past his muscular biceps, and there’s a large watch on his left wrist. He watches me closely, those sapphire eyes pinning me in place. My stomach tightens as my pulse pounds harder. It’s been weeks since we’ve been together, a self-imposed restriction that was supposed to last until our wedding night. But there was no marriage today and tonight is nothing like I dreamed it would be.
Placing a hand on his knee, I look up at him, but he avoids my gaze. I rest my eyes on his cheek and wish I could touch him gently, make him remember the man he is and find a balance between the past and the present. I can’t say the words because I haven’t done it. How can I help him? The heat from his body radiates into my palm, and I wish I could do more, but he’s way too jumpy even to try.
“Some days I feel like you and I were meant to be, but other days it seems like the world has other plans for us, and trying to find a go-around is exhausting.” I run my tongue over my lips as my mouth goes dry. “If you’ve changed your mind about us, if you don’t feel that way about me anymore—”
“Stop,” Peter breathes, and it sounds more like a plea than a scolding. He wraps his strong hands over mine and parts his lips to speak, but nothing comes out. Peter looks away, rises and begins pacing. He runs a hand through his dark hair, ruffling it, and then rests his palm on the back of his neck. When he faces me, he’s a beautiful mess of emotion, raw and real.
I rise slowly, but remain a few feet away, watching, waiting for him. There are a million reasons why this relationship shouldn’t work, and I fear that he’s going to remind me of them. My chest tightens, and it feels like I’m being squeezed. It’s everything I can manage to remain silent. I don’t want to put words in his mouth or steer him in a direction he wasn’t going to go. The silence stretches on between us until it feels like it’s going to snap.
Peter presses his eyes closed and then lets out a jagged breath before turning to me. His blue gaze connects with mine and doesn’t let go. It holds on tight with the fierce desperation he normally hides. “Sidney, I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like I’m living two lives.” He holds out one palm and then the other. “I’m an honest man, a good man who helps people. I have the perfect woman and am so close to having the quiet suburban dream. But I’m a Ferro. No matter how hard I try to separate myself from it, I can’t. It comes back, time and time again, and threatens everything we’ve made together. And now, it’s worse, because that part of my past threatens you. I feel trapped. I don’t know how to get out of it, and every time I try, it just gets worse.”
There’s true pain in his voice when he speaks, and I know how hard it is to admit this out loud. Saying it to me has to make it seem like a crushing problem. My brows pinch together, but it’s not a look of pity. I understand how he feels, and I don’t have an answer. I wish I did. I wish I could fix it and take away his pain, but I don’t know how. I’m on a tightrope, perched over a chasm too. I don’t know what to do either. The only rules I have are don’t fall off and don't look down. These days, those rules do little to help me. I don’t feel like myself anymore. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost sight of who I am.
Peter paces, turns his back to me, inhales for a moment, holds the breath, and then continues. “I promised a long time ago that I wouldn’t be that guy, but he’d be really helpful at times like this. The problem is every time I let him out, he doesn’t want to go back. Sidney, you’d hate him. He’s Dean times ten.”
I blanch and shake my head. “No. You’re not Dean—not in any way, shape, or form.”
“You don’t know. You didn’t know me then.”
“I know you now, and there’s nothing that’s the slightest bit comparable to Dean. He took what he wanted for himself. You’ve never taken a thing for yourself since I met you. You’re always doing things for other people. You put yourself last, Peter. Don’t you see that?”
He shakes his head, refusing to hear it. “That’s not me. That’s the plastic veneer, the disguise I’ve plastered over the asshole living beneath. Sidney…?” He says my name softly and the sentence trails off, asking a thousand questions at once.
I pad over to him and stand before his towering form. My jaw moves up and down as I try to say what I’m feeling, but putting it into words is threatening. I flap in a fishlike fashion for a moment before finally spitting it out. “What if we’re both in the same spot? What if we were trying to be who were instead of who we are now? What if we tried to be who we are now, and didn’t leave anything out? Would that be so bad?
“I’m angry, Peter, but part of me is screaming a war cry to stand up for myself and never back down from a fight again. I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know who that woman is exactly, but she kind of scares the hell out of me. That’s not who I was going to become, but it’s who I am now. Should I repress her? Should I shove her beneath the surface until she drowns? Or should I let her out and see what she does? It feels like I’m out of control and that scares me. I hear you saying the same type of thing—that two people are living inside of you, and they both want to steer the ship. I’m fighting the same war, and I think I’m losing.”
Peter’s voice is a whisper. “No,” his warm hand cups my cheek for a moment before he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “You’re not losing, and it’s harder for people who have real tragedies in their lives to blend their past with their present. If anyone can do it, Sidney, it’s you.”
I smile faintly and put my palm over his hand. “Bad things happened to both of us. It’s like we’re running two different operating systems at once and the result is, well, it’s a mess. I don’t trust myself anymore. I wonder which reaction is real, which one is right.” My lip rolls up on one side as I realize I’m disgusted with myself. I’ve been floundering like this for too long.
Peter smiles. “I almost forgot that you were my tech assistant. Remember the first day you came to fix the microphone when I was speaking?”
The corners of my mouth tip up. “I’ll never forget that moment. I was bouncing down the stairs happy as a clam, and then I saw you. I nearly tripped.”
“You were beautiful. You are beautiful.” He looks down at my gown and sadness fills his eyes before he lifts his gaze to mine. When he breathes, his chest rises and brushes against me, shooting static through my body. His gaze flicks between my eyes. “I’ve thanked God every day for you sitting down at my table in that restaurant and for my car dying afterward. You were a force of nature that night. You were today too. So what’s different?”
I shake my head. “I let the crazy girl inside of me out of the mental closet. I locked her in there, refusing to believe she's me. The thing is, I think she is. The docile version of me is a ghost. That life is gone. That future was erased, and now I have this one, with you. It’s not where I thought I’d end up, but that’s okay. That’s good, actually.” I try not to smile and ask him, “Does this version of me frighten you?”
He shakes his head. “Not at all. It’s rather becoming, and it complements the other edition.” His dimple shows as he glances at the floor before l
ifting his gaze to meet mine. “There are various editions of books, some rare, some first editions, and some with bindings that were considered inferior. The story remains the same, but the casing changes over time.”
I can’t help it. I beam up at him. “Is your casing changing, my poet?”
Peter snorts and hides a smile. “I don’t know. I feel like my pages are being ripped out. You tell me, is it the casing or the binding that's broken?”
“You’re not defective, Peter Ferro Granz. And I think the two versions of you could meld together if you’d let them.”
Fear flashes in his eyes. “I don’t know how that would turn out.”
“Neither do I, but a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
He steps closer and slips has hands around my waist, pressing his hips against mine. “Are you quoting scripture to me?”
“No,” I spit out, not wanting to sound like a Texan Bible thumper. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and confess, “I thought it was Abe Lincoln.”
He barks a laugh that’s truly merry. “It was both, and feel free to quote any source you think will help. I know who you are, and I know I’m lucky. Blessed even.” He breathes hard for a moment, looking down at me, watching me, and presses his lips together.
My skin prickles as I think about his hands on my skin, sliding over me—holding me tight. “Today didn’t go the way I planned.”
Peter grins, revealing that delicious dimple. “Nothing ever goes the way I plan, but today was a failure of epic proportions. I’m so sorry, Sidney. I keep thinking you’d be better off without me, safer.”
“Safe and miserable isn’t something I want.” I watch his full lips closely and swallow hard.
“I don’t want you to be miserable, and…” he pauses, breathing in deeply, his dark lashes lowering as he gazes at my mouth longingly. His voice breaks and he clears his throat and flashes a smile at me. “I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”