Page 148 of Filthy Secret (Five Points' Mob Collection 6)

“I always want you,” I rasped, eyes burning as I stared up at the ceiling.

“I know. I don’t think you ever understood what that did to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew what you were and who, Finn. I knew you could have any woman you wanted. But you chose me. I don’t even know why I’m bringing this up.”

“Because when I was all in, I was all in?”

Aoife hesitated. “Yes. I believed that.”

Scowling, I asked the ceiling, “Past tense?”

“It was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“No,” I retorted. “How the hell was that a lie? Aoife, sweetheart, I made some shitty choices along the way, but you are the best fucking decision I ever goddamn made.

“You can doubt many things about me; you can doubt that I’m a good man, you can doubt that I deserve you, but you must never, ever doubt how much I love you.”

My words were passionate, mostly because I meant them. Each and every one of them.

Loving her was the one honest and true thing I’d ever done with this fuckfest of a life of mine. That she could doubt it…

“Aoife?” I rasped.

She released a weary sigh and shuffled back to the other half of the bed.

“Go to sleep, Finn.”

Curling onto her side, with the full expanse of the mattress between us, I stared at the chasm that separated us.

I was not a man who took things slow. I was a man who made things happen.

But here, now, I couldn’t. She had every goddamn right to be angry with me, every goddamn right to be upset, but juggling the aftermath wasn’t going to be easy.

That was why I got up and showered in the spare room when I heard her breathing change. As sleep overtook her, I headed out of the apartment to the garage and drove to my office building in my Porsche coupe.

A new status quo needed to be found, and me lounging around the place, waiting for her to explode, wasn’t going to help matters.

The second I pulled out my desk chair from behind the desk, my cell phone rang.

Half expecting it to be Aoife, I sighed when I saw it was Kid.

“What?”

“Rude.”

I narrowed my eyes at the black nothingness that was the Hudson this late at night. “I have shit to do.”

“Don’t we all,” Conor sniped. “If anything, I havemoreshit than anyone else to do. Who’s the one with their hands in all the Points’ pies?”

“What do you want? A medal?”

“No. I just wanted to talk.”

Without meaning to, I focused in on the background of the call. A part of me expected to hear Michael’s screams even though Kid said the bastard had died late last night.

“What do you want to talk about?”