“Jace… I love you.”
Panic and fear froze me like the first time somebody held a gun to my head when I was sixteen. My heart was probably hitting three hundred beats per minute and in my mind I reached for any weapon I could find. The usual one. Anger.
Put this bitch in her place, Jace. You tell her love doesn’t fucking exist and she better get used to the idea that she’s just a tight-pussied little cum dumpster and you can get a thousand more just like her before the end of the day.
I was just about to stand up, send Kendall tumbling to the ground and tell her exactly that when another part of my brain spoke up with a ‘hold on, what about this?’ and an image flashed through my mind of what Kendall would look like if I said that.
That spark in her eyes would be snuffed out. That glow. Gone. She wouldn’t look at me like a hero anymore.
Oh for fuck sake. Well say something, you stupid cunt.
“Kendall… I...”
Don’t just sit there like a fucking moron. Fuck it, tell her the truth if you have to.
My stampeding heart made my voice waver with every beat. “I love you too.”
I hadn’t said those words in over two decades. But if I was telling Kendall the truth… how could I tell her the whole truth?
Chapter 22
Kendall
For the first time in my life, I was in love. I didn’t simply have a crush on somebody, I wasn’t on the outside, I was in love. Jace loved me right back.
There’d been times when I’d lay by myself in bed wondering what it felt like to be in love, to be in one of those exclusive two-person clubs. It was hard to remember exactly what I’d thought, but it probably involved running through a field of flowers in slow motion and soft-focus, before Prince Charming lifted me up and we twirled around.
The reality was so much better, yet so much more difficult. Most of the time I was so excited that I could have burst. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, stay in bed with him every moment of every day, have silly little talks in hushed whispers in the dark that nobody else would ever hear, and bask in his love forever.
All that and more was beyond my wildest dreams, but the fantasies didn’t prepare me for everything. They didn’t tell me that Prince Charming might not have grown up in a castle with loving parents. They didn’t tell me that he might have had to fight for his life before, maybe more than once.
I’d felt helpless and alone for so long that I felt almost ashamed of myself when I managed to put enough pieces of Jace’s early life together. Somewhere along the line I’d become so scared and wrapped up in my own issues that I’d forgotten that other people were hurting too.
So I told him some things that I wished somebody had told me. I couldn’t do anything about where he came from, but I hoped the words combined with all the love I had for him would be something at least.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t too late to help heal some of those old wounds, because I knew in myself just how different I felt about everything now that we were together. He seemed so relieved that day after we visited Wellfort too, like a piece of broken glass had been pulled out after hurting him for years.
If life was even a little bit fair, that should have been the only issue Jace had to deal with, but there were other things blatantly weighing heavily on his mind. The resurgence of Mafia violence that had started with the biker bar had escalated. The Picolli Crime Family seemed to take extra special interest in hitting locations that were, via various holding companies and other complicated corporate structures, ultimately owned by Jace.
It was really terrible luck. At work, Lucile was scrambling to follow up with her flop of an article by covering the new crime wave, and the police were saying that the Picollis were probably targeting businesses that refused to pay for protection.
Several times I asked him about it. I could see he was down and all I wanted to do was make him happy again. My own happiness depended on it. That was a cliché I’d heard but, again, I couldn’t have been prepared for the reality.
More than once he looked like he was going to answer, as if he’d come up with this big speech to explain to me what was going through his head. Every time, he seemed to think better of it, told me not to worry. It was just boring business stuff.
Today was no different. This afternoon, officially, we were celebrating the impending publication of my article, which had been written, re-written and polished to perfection by myself and Mr. Kinsley, and appropriately fact-checked by the research department.
Jace didn’t look to be in the celebrating mood though. He sat there, looking out at the city as it went by the tinted windows of the town car, alternately looking sad, pissed off and frustrated. Hopefully our evening at AquaVell would relax him a bit.