She felt frozen. Locked into place as all eyes turned to her, staring at her in varying degrees of pity.
“Fuck!” someone whispered, a male voice, low, a hiss of raw fury a second before Rule roared out in rage, lifted an object from the conference table in front of him and hurled it at the screen.
It shattered, throwing shards of glass outward as Jonas ducked, and those nearest turned their heads quickly to avoid the sharp projectiles.
Something stung her forehead, her cheek, but she wasn’t certain what.
The sickening realization that her parents believed the act didn’t surprise her; she had been damned good at her job over the years. But to have them voice it to these men who respected her enough to see through her party-girl act destroyed her. To know that they might suspect or even privately blame her was one thing, but to have her mother accuse her so virulently with such disgust and lack of warmth, she had to admit, laid her soul bare.
That was her mother.
The woman who had raised her . . .
No, her parents hadn’t raised her, she finally admitted.
Mark had.
They’d been busy building their business, or playing with Kandy, the girly-girl of the two sisters who liked to dress up, and didn’t get dirty and didn’t beg to go hunting with her beloved brother.
It had been Mark who had taught her how to ride her bike, to roller skate, to hunt, and to race dirt bikes over the desert. He’d taught her how to spy while making it a game, how to be quiet, how to slip out of the house and how to pick a lock.
He had been teaching her how to know what he was thinking with just a look . . .
Her eyes met Rule’s as she felt that paralyzing fear she’d felt nine years before, the first time she’d seen his eyes go feral like that. All blue with no whites, the pupil retracting with rage.
He’d been there then, she realized, her eyes locked with the naked rage and pain in the brilliant, too-sharp blue of his eyes. With the same look in that oddly colored gaze, the same wild fury she could see there now.
And the same warning.
The same warning that had been in Mark’s eyes just before he had died.
“ Don’t cry. Be brave, Peanut.” His lips moved slowly, making certain she knew what he wanted her to see, staring at her, his gaze locked on hers, intent, warning. A message she couldn’t read no matter how hard she tried. “Don’t cry. Be brave, Peanut.”
She was rarely called Peanut, she realized in that second, and never by Mark. He had never given her pet names. She was his Gypsy Rum, baby sister or baby girl. Never, ever had he called her Peanut.
And baby sisters didn’t have to be brave, he’d told her over and over again, that was a big brother’s job. He could be brave for both of them, and she could cry all she needed to.
And still, she couldn’t cry. She was brave, foolhardy even. She had taken on her brother’s work, protected her sister as she had been told over and over again that Mark would have wanted her to.
Mark died for you . . . How many times had that accusation been leveled at her in the form of a chastisement?
It wasn’t your fault, Gypsy, they knew Mark’s weakness . . .
She was his sister, but everyone had remarked as she grew older how Mark had always treated her more as his child than a sister.
“I’m supposed to be brave,” she whispered, nine years of unshed agonizing pain scraping over her throat.
Rule shook his head slowly as a tormented grimace tightened his face. “You’ve been brave enough for all of us, for far too many years.”