I Thee Take: To Have and To Hold Duet Book Two by Knight, Natasha (ready to read books .txt) 📗

“You smell like a brewery.”

“Distillery,” he corrects, his voice hoarse and scratchy. “It’s whiskey.”

“My bad.”

He looks up at me from his seat on the edge of the bed. “Can you close that?” he asks, shielding his face. The morning sun coming through the window is a glare in his eyes.

“Hungover?” I ask, pulling the ropes to close the broken blinds. “Or are you still drunk?” I turn back to him.

He looks up at me and I see the bruise forming along his jaw, see the cut on his lip and the blood on his knuckles.

“The latter,” I guess. “How do the six men you picked a fight with look?”

He grins but winces, touches a cut high on his cheekbone. “Like shit.”

I sit down beside him. “What the fuck, Dante? You have soldiers. Why were you alone?”

A darkness I don’t like, but recognize, shadows his features. “There’s some things I have to do alone, Brother.”

“Like try and get yourself killed?”

“Unlike you, I wasn’t trying to get myself killed.”

The way he says it strikes me. Maybe my brother is more intuitive than I realize. “What were you doing at that place anyway?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head.

“You just said yourself there’s some things you need to do alone. What are they? Is it those things that have you off the island so much? That have you coming back stinking of whiskey the mornings after?”

He runs a hand through his hair, turns to me. His hair’s a shade lighter than mine and sometimes, at some angles, he looks like mom in that portrait.

“I leave you to deal with Rinaldi. Leave me to deal with this.”

“What exactly is this? Tell me and maybe I’ll leave you to handle it.”

“Haven’t you got enough to keep you occupied? Maybe keeping an eye on your new wife and her brother? Enemies you’ve let have the run of our home.”

“They’re not our enemies.”

He snorts, shakes his head and looks toward the window with the slivers of light still coming in from the old-fashioned blinds that don’t quite close correctly.

“Do you ever wonder what happened to Mara?” he asks.

I’m taken aback but only miss a beat. “Of course, I do.”

“Do you wonder if she’s still out there? All alone?” he looks at me when he asks this part and I see my brother as a kid, uncertain, not cocky, not tough. Just unable to make sense of what happened. “Do you wonder if she needs us and we’re just here getting on with our lives? Forgetting her? Forgetting them?”

“We’re not exactly getting on with our lives, are we?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why is this coming up now?”

“The kid, Noah, he had a picture of her.”

“Noah? Why would he have a picture of her?”

“He’d taken one out of Lizzie’s room and he was talking to Scarlett. I walked in on them and I don’t know. I didn’t like it. It just got me thinking again if she’s still out there and helpless. They were five, Cris. Fucking five years old. How the fuck do you hurt a five-year-old kid?”

I look away. I can’t see his pain. It wounds me every time I get the slightest glimpse of it. Cuts right through me.

“You want to know what I was doing?” he asks, abruptly getting to his feet.

I remain seated and nod.

“I was looking for the girl. The one who called me that night. Who told me to come out. I’d met her a few days before at a club and I didn’t expect her to call but she did. And like a selfish ass I went out and…” he trails off, turning his back to me. “You know how I spent the night my family was being massacred?”

I get to my feet. “Don’t do this.”

“No.” He turns to me and I see something I recognize in his eyes. Hate. Self-hate. “I should do it. I should own up to it.”

“It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there. And if you had been, what the fuck for? To die? To fucking die?”

“I was getting my dick sucked for the first time. That’s what I was doing while you were being attacked. While you were being slaughtered like fucking animals.” I hear grief morph into rage at the last part. Grief turned into pain and rage.

I take a breath in, try to keep steady because he needs me to keep steady. To be the foundation, the rock he can rest on.

The room is so small, it only takes two strides to get to him. I put my hand on his shoulder. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m not saying it was. I just…I don’t fucking know.” He shoves my hand off and turns back to the window. It’s quiet for a long minute. “Do you sometimes wish you’d died with them?”

It takes me a long time to answer. “I used to. But then I’d get angry. I’d make myself see Rinaldi, see him with the knife at mom’s throat.”

I don’t tell him the other part. Dante doesn’t know what Rinaldi did to her before he killed her. I hadn’t realized my uncle knew but I guess it makes sense. Any medical examiner would have known and told him.

Dante turns to look at me.

“I’d think about that and I’d think about why I survived. And it gives me strength. Strength I needed to wake up and get out of bed for a long time. I will avenge our family. I will not rest before that happens.”

“What about Scarlett? You chose her over that vengeance.”

Now it’s my turn to shift my gaze away as I rub the back of my neck. “Scarlett has complicated things.”

“How?”

Fuck.

I face my brother but don’t quite meet his eyes. “I’m in love with her.”

It’s the first time I say it out loud. First time I really hear it. Understand it.

I focus on my brother’s eyes. I can’t tell what he thinks at hearing this. His features are schooled, steady, we’re both good at that. He studies me and I let