One Last Rainy Day: The Legacy of a Prince(94)
Decision made, when she returned from Georgia, we kept our distance from Roman’s house. We were flying blind, unknowing if he was already back in the States or who might be watching and reporting our every move.
The mindfuck of my missing brother felt like a punishment in and of itself. Despite the burn her absence caused, I hoped Cecelia would stay in Georgia to avoid being on a collision course with whatever was coming until we could do some damage control. Her reason for returning was selfless, and I knew it had everything to do with her mother—which only intensified my guilt.
The day after her return, I lost my shit and went AWOL, straying from every thought-out decision Sean, Tyler, and I had agreed upon. Sean was set to intercept her first with parts of the truth, but I allowed my need to take over—starving for the sight of her. I knew my behavior was fucking borderline as I drove like the four-letter cursed man I’d become. I was driving down the road next to Roman’s mansion, hoping she would hear my engine before idling nearby on the off chance she came out of hiding.
Eventually, she did, spotting me on the side of the road before leading me on a street chase, intent on losing me.
After realizing it was a pointless crusade I was not backing away from, she pulled over and came out swinging with war in her eyes. Delivering death blow after death blow, her stinging heart voicing every brutal delivery. My emotions were so all over the fucking place that I acted a fool by allowing them to cloud my judgment. Instead of behaving or saying what I should have, I was apologizing one second, filled with pride the next for her fiery return, and rock fucking hard after her wicked display of backbone and voicing as much. “You’ve come a long way.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
It was, and admittedly ill-timed. Her reception pulled me in and drove me to kiss her venom away, while her vicious backlash fueled me to try and bridge the separation.
During that exchange, I knew I would love her through every bit of whatever our future brought—owning it to Tobias and taking any penalty my brother doled out. I told her as much with my declaration. “I have to let you go for now, but I don’t fucking want to . . . I don’t have a choice, but everything I do now, it’s for you.”
She fought me brutally, but in the end, I knew there was forgiveness there—in both our hearts, we were far from over. Even with the hard-edged, internal change in her makeup from the damage Sean and I caused, it was evident she was ready to face my brother—if it happened—and whatever hell he brought with him.
That I was ready for, that I was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was the complete and utter devastation that greeted Sean and me when Tobias finally arrived back in Triple Falls before he, too, openly cracked in front of us.
“This was for Maman and Papa, Dom. We were so close, brother. Why?”
His voice was ragged and broken—decimating. Even as we stood, lined up like the soldiers he raised us to be—chins lifted to accept our fate while determined to plead our case—in seeing the damage we’d done, we both faltered. The more he unraveled, the more our argument paled, our fight lessening as he leapt between agony and fury—both devastating. “Tell me, brothers . . . word for word, how you deceived me for three months.”
Our sentence passed? Ten months. Ten fucking months.
Three times as many as I admitted we’d been deceiving him, adding another to ensure we knew just how much his faith in us had been destroyed.
“Tell me every single thing you did, every purposeful lie you told me, every move you made to betray me this way, to keep me in the dark, and then . . . tell me how you love . . . tell me you love me.”
With our every objection refused and dismissed—even after openly admitting we loved her—we agreed to his soul-crushing sentence.
What he told us next had us reeling. Before we’d had a chance to intercept, Tobias had outed himself to Cecelia. Sean and I firmly believed at the time that collision annihilated any hopes we had of convincing him of her place with us. That he saw what I saw when he laid his eyes on her. That he perceived her as a na?ve and innocent girl with no business in our business, no place in our world, and no promise. He had not a single fuck to give about any of our admissions because he couldn’t see past his devastation.
“I can’t even fucking look at you!”
He hasn’t since. Not once.
Drunk to the point of nearly passing out, his words and mindset were crystal clear. As Tyler drove Tobias away, we chose his sentence and the club, our brothers, and our purpose, believing if there was a way to get her back, to lessen its length, we’d find it. That Tobias would forgive us, reduce our time, and bring us home.
It was his ultimatum of no contact with her that had us raw as we tied up any loose ends before we broke our lives down into boxes. Sean and I turning over our townhouse keys to Tyler as movers herded our shit out to storage until our future was decided. My suspicions were that Tyler was already living elsewhere and remained tight-lipped about it during the move. Neither of us gave him shit about it because he spared us his own backlash for his strained relationship with Tobias, along with a promise to vigilantly watch over Cecelia.
This is all we could ask for because even as he did promise to guard her, we didn’t get to know anything else.
But it was the last day—the day we were leaving for the airport, that refused and still refuses to release me.