Logan held me tighter. “They should have been yours.”
“Yes.” Emotion clogged my throat, and I tried to swallow around it. “I think I made a mistake, Logan. Asking this of you. Bringing you into this.”
His arms tightened more. “It’s too late if it was.”
“I would die first.” My eyes pinched closed on the truth. “Before I let anything happen to any of you.”
“No one’s dying, Aster, no one except for your husband.” He gritted it at the back of my head. Then he pushed away and rounded the car, clicking the locks as he went.
I stared at him over the top.
“It’s already done, Aster. Just get in.”
I shouldn’t. I should end this now. Before it was too late. Because as desperately as I wanted my freedom, to be my own person, it was the moment I realized I wasn’t sure I could handle losing Logan all over again.
NINE
LOGAN
LOS ANGELES, EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
Late afternoon lightfloated through the window where Logan sat at the small kitchen table. His textbooks were spread in front of him, and his laptop was open to the report he was writing for his English 101 class. Not that he intended to do a whole lot with words. Numbers were his game.
He heard the rumble of a motorcycle approaching in the distance. A spot of excitement hit his chest. He was used to being alone, it didn’t bother him all that much, but he had to admit sometimes the silence got to him.
It gave him too much time to think.
Too much time to ponder what life might have been like if his mother were still alive.
Too much time to contemplate the dynamic of his family.
More than anything, it gave him too much time to worry over his brothers, what danger they might find themselves in that day.
Logan knew Trent and Jud tried to hide the truth of who they were from him and Nathan. They did it out of love, hoping to guard them from the brutality of their day-to-day.
That didn’t mean it didn’t sometimes make Logan feel detached. Like he wasn’t a part of who they were, as ugly as it might be.
The roar increased before Logan heard the bike come to an idle in the driveway of the four-bedroom house he lived in with his brothers. They’d moved there when Trent was twenty, when he’d stepped up and made the choice to take Jud, Logan, and Nathan out of their father’s home and bring them there.
Away.
Separated.
Where it was safer.
Lonelier, too, because it was a world apart from where Trent and Jud spent most of their days and nights.
The side door opened, and Trent pushed through, donning his cut and worn boots and that darkly quiet ferocity forever hewn on his face.
Vengeance.
Cruelty.
Trent might not ever admit it, but Logan knew he’d been hunting their mother’s killer since the day she’d been ruthlessly gunned down in front of their old house when Logan had only been nine.
His spirit curled in on itself when he remembered it. A crushing he was sure would never abate. He gulped around it when Trent jutted his chin his way. “Hey, man, how are you, brother?”
“Good.” Logan eyed him in speculation. “What are you doing here? I thought you had business tonight?”