Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(51)

But I felt as if I’d completely lost ground. Everything I’d been fighting for somehow felt like a sham.

Warily, I peeked back at him. The man sat in the chair, looking like the king of his own city sprawled out below him.

A conqueror.

A warrior.

Chest bare and abdomen rippling.

Eyes keen.

The longer pieces of his hair whipped around him like a flaming crown, the sides cropped, making the man look every bit the beast that he was.

Yet, there was something about him that remained so unbearably lost.

Sapphire eyes so soft I could fall right inside.

It took about everything I had not to drop at his feet.

I wanted to remain strong. Push him away. Remember how being this close to him only hurt me time and again.

But right then, the only thing I felt was weak.

A tremor rolled through my being.

Or maybe it wasn’t weakness.

Maybe I really just needed the one person who could fully understand.

My hands cinched tighter around the metal. “Do you ever wonder where our lives went wrong? Where we changed course or if we were just heading this direction all along?” I hedged, trying to find the best way to invite him into my heart.

Into my grief.

He huffed out a strained breath. “Every day, Nikki. I think about this shit every day. I think we both know exactly where it went wrong.”

I glimpsed him from the corner of my eye. He lifted a tumbler to his mouth, a half-empty bottle of amber fluid sitting on the table next to him. He took a long drink.

“It only gets worse when the date gets nearer,” he reluctantly added.

Yet, to me, it felt like a gift. His words, his heart, something he had refused to offer me over all these years.

“Fourteen years,” I agreed. “I can’t believe that much time has passed. I can’t believe it’s been so long since our foundation was ripped out from under us. It shaped us into different people,” I offered, praying he’d get it.

That I needed him to listen.

That I needed him to be there.

For me.

His grating words filled the distance that separated us. “It doesn't matter how many years go by, it feels like it was yesterday. Feels like I’m stuck there, and I'm never gonna get out.”

His confession was hardened with regret.

Muted in sorrow.

“I was there with you. But you wouldn’t let me be there for you. You wouldn’t let me stay.” My voice was a whisper that got swept up in the wind. It felt as if Sydney was caught in it, a ghost howling as she blew through.

I felt him flinch. The man hit by the weight of the reality, even when I knew he never wanted to face it.

“Couldn’t let you stay there because you didn't need to be in the middle of my mess.”

I looked at him from over my shoulder. My breath hitched.

My beautiful beast, who was so angry at the world, angry at himself, sitting there with his chin lifted and his nostrils flaring.

I knew he would charge into the distance and change it all if he was given the chance.

I knew he would be willing to sacrifice everything.

“If it was your fault, then it was my fault, too.”

“Don’t ever say that,” he spat, jumping to his feet.

Fire and rage.

They lit like a fury inside him.

My head slowly shook. “You know it’s true, Ollie. You can’t erase the fact that I was there with you. That we were together. That I’m every bit as responsible as you.”

“No. I was responsible for her. Just the same as I am for you.”

Those eyes blazed as he took a step forward, and he fisted his hand over his heart. “I was the one who fucked it up. I was the one who pushed things between us when I knew I was crossing lines I wasn’t allowed to cross. I was the one who sent her away.”

Grief lined his voice.

Emotion tingled my throat, and my eyes stung.

Part of me wanted to stop it.

Walk away and pretend all of this wasn’t crashing over me, threatening to bury me alive. The other part wanted to hang on to every second.

It was the first time in years Ollie had opened up to me. A door opened when it’d forever been closed.

“She would have understood,” I told him, knowing with all of me that she would have.

He turned his head, looking to the far corner of the balcony. “We had a pact.”

The memory it shivered around us. A reel playing in sync in our minds. The vow we’d made before we’d understood that one day we would grow and change and things would no longer look the same.

If I focused hard enough, I could still feel the cut Ollie had made on my palm.

“We were eight years old, Ollie. You were nine. Kids,” I told him. “We grew up. All of us changed.”

Slowly, he swiveled his attention back. Every muscle in his body was held in restraint. “And you know exactly what happened when we did.”

Grief pulsed through the silence that raged between us. So many things left unsaid for so many years. It tickled our ears and hammered our hearts as we finally brought our truths out into the light.

Tears stung my eyes, and I swallowed Ollie’s intensity and forced myself to speak. “Fourteen years ago, did I leave everyone else behind, too?” I whispered, the words a tremor.