Defiant Princess (Boys of Oak Park Prep #2) - Callie Rose Page 0,71

chest. It’d been pure animal instinct that’d made me do that, a desperate impulse not to let Mason escape. I needed answers, and I wasn’t going to let him threaten or evade this time.

“I could’ve hurt you, Talia,” he said harshly, finally digging an ice pack out of the freezer and turning to face me. The fading bruises on his cheek and jaw stood out in the dim light.

I didn’t bother pointing out that he already had. It was a truth we both knew unequivocally, just like the fact that the sky was blue or grass was green.

He flicked off the tap with an angry gesture, but when he took my hand in both of his, bending my fingers a little and running his thumbs over my bruised palm, his touch was surprisingly gentle.

I kept my gaze on his face as he focused on my hand. “Finn told me.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, but he didn’t look at me. “So?”

“Is it true?”

“Yes.”

What had I expected him to say?

No?

That this was all some new elaborate lie, some hoax to set me up? I’d known he wouldn’t do that. He believed with every fiber of his being that Charlotte Hildebrand had been responsible for his mother’s death.

“What happened?” When he refused to answer, his fingers still manipulating my hand gently, I tugged on it, almost pulling it from his grip. “Mason. Everything you did to me, you did because of this. You owe me.”

His emerald gaze flashed up to meet mine suddenly, and he looked like he was about to tell me where I could shove whatever he owed me. But instead, he remained frozen for a long moment, staring into my eyes. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

He ducked his head, and I watched him draw in several deep breaths before he finally said, “I remember you.”

“What?”

“From when we were little.” He reached for the ice pack on the counter and wrapped it around my hand, keeping his focus on his task. “More an idea of you than actual memories. You wore yellow all the time, I remember that. A little girl dressed in sunshine.”

There was something almost tender in his voice, and I held myself rigid against the sound of it, refusing to let it penetrate my heart.

“I remember your mom too, just a little. Mostly, I remember fighting. I remember her screaming at my mom. My mom crying.” His voice was tense and strained like a rubber band that might snap at any moment, and when I looked at his face, the same desperate pain I’d seen before contorted his features. “I was eight when she died, so I didn’t understand what was happening then. I just knew there was something wrong with her. She was quiet all the time. She cried all the time. And then she—”

He broke off, dragging in a harsh breath.

“Finn told me you found her,” I whispered.

He didn’t answer that with words, but his silence, the tension rippling through every muscle in his body as if he might tear apart at any second, said plenty.

A heavy silence stretched between us until finally, I spoke again.

“I don’t understand though. How do you know it was anything my mom did? She’d been gone for years by then. How do you know your mom wasn’t…”

My words trailed off. It was possible Mason’s mom had been dealing with demons completely unrelated to my own mother. Depression was a real and terrible thing. But I didn’t know how to broach that subject without sounding like I was trying to deflect blame from my mom.

“She left a note.” Mason shrugged. His voice was blank now, devoid of any emotion, as if the excess of feelings had caused a complete shutdown in his heart. “My dad didn’t even let me read it until much later, but I kept insisting until he finally showed it to me. She said your mom was right about everything. That she was horrible, ugly inside, didn’t deserve to live… It was a long list of reasons she gave for killing herself, and every one of them, your mom planted in her head.”

Against every self-preservation instinct in my body, against the fortifications I’d built up and reinforced around my heart, against logic and common fucking sense, pity rose up inside me.

“I’m sorry, Mason. You didn’t deserve to lose your mom like that.”

He didn’t say anything, just pulled the ice pack away from my hand and set it back