Page 75 of Empire of Lust
“What you’re telling me is I should leave him alive.”
“Not because I care about him,” she insists, squeezing my hand tight enough to grind my knuckles together. “You have to know that. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea. I just don’t want it on my conscience, you know?”
“I understand.” I don’t want it on her conscience, either. She doesn’t need that. I’m the one already damned after all the things I’ve done. I wouldn’t put her through that because we aren’t the same. Her pure soul might have a dark streak, but mine is entirely dark—if it still exists at all, something I questioned more than once over the years.
If anything, she’s proven to me I do have a soul, and it belongs to her.
“Are you disappointed?”
The innocence behind that question makes me chuckle before I can hold back. Her brows draw together in pain, and I raise her hand to my lips to press a kiss against it. “I don’t mean to laugh at you. That question makes me sound like a psycho.”
“That’s not what I think of you.”
I have to wonder. I haven’t done much to prove otherwise.
“But are you, though? I know you want to get back at him. But don’t do that for my sake, please.”
“Are you that concerned? You don’t have to be.”
“It’s just…” She sighs, looking toward the window. It’s late afternoon on a hot summer day, and there’s a haze hanging over the grounds. “It’s really beautiful out there, isn’t it?”
The abrupt change of subject makes me follow the direction of her gaze. “It is. I’ve always thought so.”
“You worked really hard to put everything in place, didn’t you? The house, everything.”
“It took a lot of work and a lot of oversight. When I bought it, this was nothing but a plot of land surrounding an old house. A few small outbuildings and a lot of weeds.”
“What put it in your mind? Your vision, I mean. Where did it come from?”
Why is she asking these questions? “You need to get some sleep.”
She only clutches my hand tighter, swinging her head from side to side. “No, I’m serious. Where did it all come from? I really want to know.”
And I really wish she would let it go. This is Bianca, the woman I will spend the rest of my life with. It’s only right that she would want to know me, isn’t it? This is how so-called regular relationships work. Two people share with each other, give and take, back and forth. They open themselves up and make themselves vulnerable.
I am not vulnerable. I have no intention of being vulnerable, even for her.
Still, it clearly means something, this line of questioning. There must be something behind it.
“I’ve never told anybody,” I admit. “Then again, nobody’s ever asked.”
“You can tell me,” she whispers, trying and failing to hide her interest. “It’ll be our little secret.”
Her youthful innocence and excitement do something to me. I can almost believe it’s safe to open up and share myself. “TV. When I was a kid, way back in the day, prime-time dramas were the big thing. All these shows with wealthy families in huge mansions, living incredible lives. There I was, living in a house where we froze in the winter and roasted in the summer, and it seemed…”
My chest is so tight I have to look away from her. Away from the curiosity of her stare. “It seemed like they were living on another planet.”
“It isn’t easy imagining you as a little boy.”
“I was, once. The girl who lived across the street would come in and sit with me at night while my dad worked. She was the one watching those shows on our old console TV. You know, the kind with the wooden cabinet around it?” She frowns, but nods. She’s probably never seen one but is too kind to tell me so.
“And that’s where you got the idea you wanted to be wealthy one day?”
“Who doesn’t want to have money? But looking back, I think that was my first glimpse at the way life could be. Otherwise, I would’ve ended up working myself into an early grave the way my old man did.”
“You still work really hard. You’re in your office all hours.”
“Not the same,” I murmur, shaking my head. Strange, but the stench of my father’s work coveralls seems to hang in the air around me now. I’m almost afraid to blink. If I do, I might find this was all a dream, that I imagined my life up to this point. I’m still sitting in that old house built for families working at the refinery that sprawled upward like a gothic castle. Like so many other tiny houses built for the workers, men and women who couldn’t afford to think past today, maybe tomorrow. Scratching out a living and fighting to survive.