King's Reign (Sydney Storm MC 6)

“What stuff?”

“You and I stuff.”

Her face lit up and she came to me, moving in closer than necessary. “I’m all for that.”

Jesus, she thought I meant something I didn’t.

I shook my head and took a step back. “No, that’s not what this is about. This won’t ever be about that.”

Her face clouded over with disappointment. “Really? You expect me to believe you would protect me from my husband and then from Brant, bring me to Sydney, set me up here, come whenever I call you over, fix stuff for me, drive me to job interviews, and yet not want to be with me? I don’t buy that bullshit for one minute, King. You want us to be together again.”

Fucking hell.

I could see where she was coming from, but what the fuck happened to people just fucking looking out for each other because they cared about their safety and happiness? Why the fuck did there have to be conditions and expectations around stuff like this?

“I don’t want us to be together again so you need to get that out of your head now. I did all that shit because even after all these years and after everything we’ve been together, I care about you. Just not in the way you think.”

The disappointment on her face morphed to anger. “That is such utter crap and you know it. Men don’t do stuff for women they don’t wanna fuck.”

“That’s some twisted fucking thinking, Ivy. Of course they fucking do. And trust me when I say I don’t wanna fuck you.” I hadn’t intended to be hurtful, but I saw that reaction in her eyes.

Before I could stop her, she closed the distance between us, grabbed my face, and kissed me.

It was a hard, desperate kiss, and I felt nothing.

Nothing but the realisation we really had reached the end of the line.

I’d already come to that understanding, but this absolutely and undeniably confirmed it. Where her touch had once sparked the kind of passion that would consume me for days, it now left me empty.

I took hold of her arms and forced her away from me. Staring down at her, I bit out, “Don’t ever do that again. When I tell you something, I fucking mean it. And I mean it when I say I don’t want to be with you.”

She stared at me through tears. Hot, angry tears. Not sad ones. And then the ra

ge came, and I knew this was repressed anger by the violence of it. It was also what she needed to get out of her, so I allowed it all to spew out without interruption. That, I would give her. That, she deserved from me. “I fucking hate you! And I fucking love you! And all I wanna do is forget you, but you are un-fucking-forgettable, King. That”—she jabbed her finger at me—“is the worst part of all this. I’ve tried for years to put you out of my mind, and I fucking failed. I didn’t want to come to you about Tony, because I knew seeing you would kill me, but I did. I fucking came, and I helped you, and this is what I get for that? I even told Brant not to hurt your friend, and I thought he’d listened to me—”

My body tensed, every inch of me alert as her words triggered my fury. “What the fuck did you just say?”

She flinched at my tone and tried to move away from me, but I grabbed her arm and held her in place. “Tell me what the fuck you mean by that, and so fucking help you God, if you mean what I think you mean, shit isn’t gonna be pretty.”

Swallowing hard, she said, “You were right about Brant—he was crazy. Insane probably. I didn’t know about his past, but I knew he was the kind of man to do anything for the woman he loved. And he loved me, so I let him close and I let him help me escape Tony. But I swear I didn’t know he was going to shoot that woman. He’d told me he was tracking the woman you were seeing, and that he wanted to get back at you for all the stuff you did to me years ago. I told him to drop it, because that stuff was in the past, but he was intent on hurting you through her. I honestly thought he meant he was just going to hurt her. I never imagined killing her was on his mind.”

I shifted my grip from her arm to her neck. Holding her tightly, I backed her up against the wall, pressing her hard to it. “Tell me the fucking truth. You fucking knew he was going there to kill her, didn’t you?”

Fear flashed in her eyes as she clawed at my hand around her throat. “Let me go, King! I didn’t know. I promise.” She struggled to get the words out, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was dancing the line between sane and crazy here with her revelation, and it was a fucking taut line close to snapping and taking us all down with it.

Thrusting my face forward, I stared into her eyes. “Fucking tell me the truth, Ivy! At least fucking give me that!”

Tears streamed down her face, landing on my hand, but I ignored them. I didn’t care about her tears anymore. “This is the truth. I might hate you, but I love you more. If I’d known his intentions, I would have made sure I stopped him. I wouldn’t allow anyone to hurt you like that. Just like I didn’t let Tony hurt you.”

Hard, angry breaths forced their way out of me as I searched her eyes madly for the truth. It was in the blink, and she hadn’t blinked. She hadn’t fucking blinked.

Fuck.

With one last squeeze of her neck, I let her go and jerked away from her.

We stared at each other, a furious and bitter tension sitting between us. After all these years, this is what we had come down to. She said she loved me more than she hated me, but I didn’t think she did. Love didn’t lead to actions like hers. It was a false love. It was the kind of love rooted in fear and doubt. She might have thought she still loved me, but that was only because she didn’t trust herself enough to love herself and let me go. I could blame myself for her brokenness, but she’d had years to move past what happened between us. She’d had time and resources to help herself, and she’d chosen not to use them. We were all responsible for our own happiness; no one could do a damn thing to make Ivy happy until she decided to make herself happy.

“I’m going to walk out that door and I’m never coming back. You need something, you ask Brian. He sees fit to ask me for help with it, I’ll do what I can. Other than that, this is the end of the road for us, Ivy. And as much as you may not believe this, I just want you to be fucking happy.”