“It wasn’t mine. I thought it was Ian’s. So, I took the fall for it. I was scared that, if I denied it, Ian would end up in jail or dead, and I would rather die than see that happen to him.”
Jace scraped a palm over his face, a rigid guilt bunching up his shoulders as he looked at the floor for a beat. “I have to tell you something, Faith.”
Dread flooded my senses. “What?”
“I . . . that guy . . . Steven? Do you remember me telling you about him? The guy I got arrested for assaulting?”
My nod was shaky. “Yes. He’s the one you were protectin’ Ian from. How could I forget that?”
Jace’s expression twisted in shame. “He forced me into moving stuff for him. That night, the coke that was in my bag? It wasn’t mine. But I had been doing deliveries for him. Picking up packages at the dock, running them across town to different stash houses. I got the feeling he really didn’t need me to do it for him. He was only using it as a way to get me under his thumb. As a way to control me. I should have known right away that his intentions were to get all three of us—Ian and Joseph and myself—into that world.”
Jace reached out and grabbed me, his hold pleading.
“I didn’t want to, Faith. I swear to you, I didn’t want to. But he told me if I didn’t, what he’d done to Ian the first time would pale in comparison to what he would do. He wanted to make me obligated to him. He knew once I was, Ian and Joseph would follow.”
Disbelief whooshed through my consciousness, my heart sluggish as I tried to catch up with the information Jace was giving me.
Could I ever blame him?
Jace had told me he would do anything to protect Ian and Joseph. It wasn’t until then that I finally understood the lengths he’d actually go to in order to do it.
Anger lifted in him again, a blaze across his skin.
“I’d thought I was taking the fall for Ian . . . protecting him . . . so I’d confessed that it was mine.”
“Jace.” His name was a whisper. Torture and devotion. How was it fair that he’d gone through all of this and I’d not even known? “I thought it was because we broke into this house?”
Maybe I really was naïve. Nothing but the same stupid little girl who’d convinced Jace to sneak into this house.
Jace shook his head. “If that was all it’d been, I’d have gotten away with a slap to the wrist.”
He swallowed hard. “The day I got taken away, I made them promise me . . . made them promise me that neither of them would go anywhere near Steven again. I didn’t know he’d already sunk his claws into Joseph before I left, didn’t know that Joseph was the one who put the drugs in my bag. I found out the day I was released from jail. I still don’t know why he did it. He never would confess that he was the one who actually did.”
Shock jarred me back. “What do you mean never confessed it? You talked to him?”
Nervously, Jace yanked at the front of his hair. “Yes, Faith, I talked to him.”
Agony sliced through the center of me.
As if it were hacking through the two men I had loved.
Because I hadn’t known Jace had even talked to Joseph in all those years.
Joseph had told me Jace was dead to him.
Dead to us.
It’d hurt, but I’d had to accept that Jace had left me behind. Left us behind.
I’d accepted it and lived my life the best way I knew how under those circumstances.
The fact it was so different sent ripples of anguish splintering through me like shockwaves.
“He came to me through the years for money when he’d get himself into trouble.”
I blinked at Jace. “What do you mean, he came to you? You saw him?”
I clutched the towel around me, scrambling back a little. I couldn’t stop the horror in the words. The accusation in them.
But Jace hadn’t mentioned that he’d ever seen Joseph. Not once in all this time he’d been here.
In all we’d shared.
And Joseph sure had never said he’d seen Jace in all the years that we’d been married.
Hurt bottled in my chest, and unrest whipped through the atmosphere. These fierce lashes of anxiety and worry that clawed through my bones. As if I was about to get sucked away into a vortex.
A hurricane I couldn’t escape. One that would destroy everything.
“He . . . you talked to h-h-im?” I asked again through a stuttered whisper, still unable to process how that was even a possibility.
Pain streaked through Jace’s face.
Torture.
“Yes. Through the years, yes, Faith. I talked to him. And I knew he’d gotten himself in deep. That he was living the way he shouldn’t. He’d come to me when he needed something. When he’d gotten himself into trouble and didn’t know how to get himself out of it.”