She met my gaze. “That night? After I’d finally confronted him and told him to tell me what was wrong. He came back just before dawn. He’d been drinking . . . obviously upset. He’d said he wanted to erase you from my memory. He promised he was going to take care of us, that he was going to fix everything. Crying when he said everything was goin’ to be all right.”
Guilt blazed in her eyes when she looked up at me. “I ignored it, Jace. I ignored it and shoved it away as some drunken nonsense he’d been spoutin’. Ignored it because he’d said he wanted to erase you from me, and that was the last thing I wanted him to do. I ignored it harder when I got the call that he’d been killed.”
Her fingernails clawed into my skin. “I should have known. I should have said something.”
She choked over a cry. “How could he do somethin’ that would put Bailey in danger? I don’t understand, Jace. I don’t understand.”
I hugged her closer, desperately trying to release the confession, but the words were hanging on as tight as a man about to go overboard.
Nothing but death and darkness waiting below.
She’d hate me when she knew.
I toyed with a lock of her hair. Trying to find the nerve. My words were measured as I prepared to lay it all out. “How much did you know about what Joseph did for work?”
I always wondered how the slimy asshole had convinced her he was legit.
She blinked at me, stuttered a bit, “He . . . he’d started working down at the shippin’ yards right after you left. He got promoted quickly.”
I cringed and then gently prodded. “Do you remember how quickly?”
How he went from a minimum-wage job in the warehouse to claiming to own the cargo front in a handful of years?
But it was Joseph who had been owned.
Her brow squeezed. Like she was fighting the truth of everything that was written in front of her. “He said . . . he said he was working hard to give me the life that I deserved. So that, one day, we could buy this house and I’d be able to live out my own dream.”
Hate fisted my guts. So fucking tight.
She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
She blinked at me. “Did . . . did you know he was involved in something he shouldn’t have been? Did Mack? Oh God,” she whimpered, the pain I’d wanted to shield her from slid out. “How didn’t I know? How didn’t I know he was involved in somethin’ he shouldn’t have been?”
Horror filled her words. Grief clouding over her like an eclipse.
The love she had for him showing through. The care. Her own regret.
“It wasn’t your fault, Faith. There was nothing that you could have done that would have stopped what was coming.”
That was on me.
“What was comin’, Jace?” she pleaded. “Did you talk to him after you left? Did . . . did he tell you somethin’?”
My tongue soured with the confession that gathered there. Everything I knew. Unsure if either of us was prepared to take the blow.
I sucked in a deep breath, the words dying on my tongue when the little voice echoed through the wall. “Mommy?”
Chocolate eyes went wide, her guilt stripped away. In its place was a flustered panic. “Oh, goodness. Bailey.”
I brushed my thumb over her cheek. “Hey . . . it’s okay. I told you, I’m in this with you. For you. For her.”
Faith eased a little, and I sent her a soft smile before I rolled out of the bed and pulled on my jeans, quick to head out of the bedroom like it’d granted me a stay of execution.
A moment’s reprieve.
Reprieve that came in the form of the tiny thing that stood in the hall outside her door, rubbing one of those tiny fists in her eye as she clung to the Beast.
“Jacie,” she whispered in some kind of relief when she saw me there. “I’s had a bad dream.”
Like she found comfort in my presence. That just for the fact I was standing there, she was protected and safe.
A belt of emotion tightened around my chest.
Never had I known it stronger than right then.
I’d never allow anything to happen to her.
Not to Faith.
Not to us.
Joseph had left enough wreckage behind.
I was going to pick up the pieces.
Thirty-Five
Jace
Twenty-One Years Old
Jace didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to see his brother. Ian leaned against his car in the parking lot, looking like freedom and the road to Jace’s second chance.
He was going to take it.
Run with it.
Run home and to the one thing he never should have left behind.
It’d taken locks and bars and cells to finally figure out who he was and what she’d seen in him, and he was determined to become that man.