This was happiness, I thought. This was what all those ooey-gooey poems King wrote for Cressida were about. Because of this feeling that existed in my gut like a living breathing entity, Lila had continued to love Nova across years and traumas. This was what I saw whenever I looked at Loulou and Zeus in a room together—that indefinable look in their eye. The way Harleigh Rose and Lion’s chemistry buzzed through any space they cohabited like an electrical storm confined to their orbit.
This. This. This.
And now, I had it.
Me.
Little Bea Lafayette. The afterthought, the “less than”, the second string.
I had the attention of the most beautiful man I’d ever known.
No, more than that. Not just his attention, not just some silly crush or some transient bout of lust.
I had his obsession.
And unlike most, I knew just what an obsession was to a psychopath, to a man like Priest. He saw me when he closed his eyes, and he thought of me in the black spaces between other thoughts. He would go out of his way to stalk me, to watch me so he could know me and my life inside out. There was nothing I could do, I knew, that Priest would not be curious about.
I knew this because I was a student of psychology, but more, I knew this because I felt that way too.
It made me wonder if, beneath all the pink ribbons and white frills, I might just be a bit of a psychopath myself.
Two psychos in love, I thought and laughed louder.
“It’s a good thing everyone was awake already,” Loulou drawled, drawing my attention to the doorway where she leaned with a hand on the deep flare of her hip and her brows raised. “You’re shouting down the house.”
I snorted a little as I calmed down, dashing the tears from my face with my thumbs before I shot a massive grin at her. “Sorry.”
“You seem it,” she noted dryly. “Are you sorry for waking Z and me up with your midnight rendez-vous last night too?”
I blinked at her, shocked.
Honestly, I’d thought we’d been relatively quiet, especially over the calamity of the storm battering the house. I also would have thought, if they heard us, they would come to…I don’t know…investigate at the very least or shoot Priest in the face for touching me.
With a heavy sigh, Loulou moved into the room and closed the door, then made her way over to the bed where she sat down gingerly at my side. Disgust flittered across her beautiful face as she studied the covers, and I realized she was looking for evidence of sex in my sheets.
Quickly, I yanked the duvet up to my chin and glared at her.
“Bea,” she said on a beleaguered sigh, then paused to run her hand through her long blond hair, the same shade and thickness as mine. “Everything in me is hoping the man here last night was some mild-mannered college kid from one of your classes. Please tell me I’m right?”
I bit my lip, and it seemed to be answer enough for her.
She slumped slightly, and I watched her hand as it played with the edge of the charcoal grey duvet. “Yeah, well, I knew it was a long shot.” I watched as she sucked in a long breath to brace for our inevitable fight. “What the hell were you thinking, Bea? You gave yourself to Priest McKenna? He’s ten years older than you and about as outlaw as they come.”
I rolled my eyes so hard they hurt. “You have absolutely no right to chastise me. You aren’t my mum. And you really want to be a massive hypocrite? Your husband is nineteen years older than you, and you married him when you were seventeen years old and still a senior in high school!”
“This is completely different, and you know it,” she argued, leaning forward as if proximity to her argument alone would change my mind. “Zeus was a father, a loyal and loving man who just so happened to go to jail for killing a man to save me. He’s warm and loving, and he would do anything for me.”
“I’m not insulting Zeus,” I said, throwing up my hands in exasperation because my sister was always so damn quick to defend her husband. “He’s all of those things. But why can’t Priest be those things too?”
Loulou blinked at me. “He’s a killer, Bea. Not someone who’s murdered someone because they have to, but someone who chooses to end people’s lives because he likes it.”
“He kills people for the very club you love and champion,” I reminded her haughtily, hating her for one vicious, fleeting moment.
I’d hated Loulou before, so this wasn’t new.
We were sisters.
Whoever said sisters always got along was obviously not a sister. We fought hard, but in the end, we always loved harder.