Page 118 of I Will Revel in Glory (Death by Daybreak MC 3)
I ignore him, focusing my attention on Grey instead. I’m not sure if he knows one of the men has walked into the room or not, or if it would even matter if he did.
“What does that even mean?” I grind out, getting annoyed. “Don’t talk in circles, Grey. That’s a mafia thing. Grow some balls and say what you mean.”
“I don’t feel in layers, Gidge. There’s one simple answer for everything: my mother is in my way, so my mother deserves to die. I don’t pine for her affection the way you pine for your father’s.”
I laugh at that, the sound caustic and dark, and I shake my head.
“You’re an idiot if you really believe that, Grey. You told me I was your hard line? Well, let me be exactly that for you: if you don’t acknowledge how you feel, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass. I don’t care if it’s ten days from now or ten years from now, mark my words.”
“I have never loved my parents,” he tells me, and that sentence reeks of dark honesty. “But I love you. I always will, and that’s my problem. Once I give love, it’s impossible to take it away.” He swigs another drink of alcohol as I frown at the screen. Getting drunk right now is not a good idea. I don’t want to lose the only friend I’ve ever had that has this dark life in common with me. “Don’t worry, though: I won’t make another pass at you. I can take sex off the table easily enough.”
“I wasn’t concerned about that,” I tell him as Crown makes a small sound of annoyance and shakes his head. He exhales dramatically, loudly enough that I know that Grey is meant to hear.
Grey doesn’t seem to care, ignoring Crown’s presence as if he wasn’t there at all.
“You need to sit down and think about the motivations behind what you’re doing. Is this really all about helping me? About achieving peace without further bloodshed? Or are you just chasing revenge and power?”
“They arrive to the casino on Friday, but I’d wait until Saturday, at the very least. It gets busy on a Saturday night anyway. If you’re careful with your hair and makeup and keep your head down, the facial recognition cameras might not catch you when you walk in. They’re positioned all over the premises, but there are gaps in the coverage.” Grey continues to drink his Scotch, ignoring my probing questions, and very clearly not in the mood to listen to any more conjecture about his emotional well-being.
I sigh.
We will be picking up this conversation later.
For now …
“Call me back from a number you don’t care about Cat seeing. I need to record our conversation and show it to him. Not that he won’t suspect we’re doing exactly what we’re doing here, but it’ll help. I need to get Reba off the compound, and I need to do it quick. Cat is sympathetic toward me, but he isn’t stupid, empathetic, or kindhearted.”
Grey sits there for a moment, and then nods. He hangs up, calls me back, and we start our conversation all over again, but in a much more clinical way, a way that doesn’t involve feelings whatsoever.
Crown ends up sitting on the edge of the bed as he waits for me. As soon as I finish the call and end the recording, I lift my eyes up to find his green ones watching me with a dark intensity.
“I want nothing more than to put you in a box and keep you on a shelf,” he murmurs, exhaling and reaching up to dig fingers into his thick, shiny hair. “The thought of you getting hurt, of dying … I can’t deal with it, Gidge. I never could. It was one of the reasons that I thought I might be able to let you go. If you’d run off and found a new life, I wouldn’t have chased you.”
“But now I’m here, and you know my terms. Crown, I know you’re worried about me. I understand now that you’ve been worried about me all this time.” My breath escapes in a rush as I dig my fingernails into the surface of his comforter. It’s a quilt this time; it looks old, too, and I recall that Crown mentioned his mother being an antique collector.
How odd, that once upon a time, Crown was a boy with a mom, that he wasn’t an ex-cop or a vice president or my reluctant lover. Just a kid. Did he have a proper childhood? Or did he grow up like Sin and I did? Rushed through life and thrust straight into darkness.
“But you’re still going to demand that we take you to the casino,” he says, and I can see that he’s already plotting, already planning. He isn’t sure what to make of this tip. Once again, it could easily be a trap. Once again, he isn’t going to want me anywhere near the Triangle Lake Resort. “You understand that the final decision is up to Cat, don’t you?”
