Obsessed (The Protectors #13) - Sloane Kennedy Page 0,74

my confrontation with Matias, I’d gone to my room to find a bag to put Ryan's belongings in for his spur-of-the-moment trip with his brother. I'd just assumed Matias had gone outside.

Granted, after his comment about faking it, I hadn't really cared where the man went. I'd just wanted to escape his presence. The idea that he could so easily fake a relationship with me made me sick to my stomach. Maybe I deserved it for my actions, but I couldn't regret what I'd done. While I'd fallen asleep relatively quickly the night before while in Matias’s arms, I'd woken up a mere hour later. My mind had been racing with thoughts of what it would be like to live life on the run. I had enough money in my bank account that I could do it, but the fact was that I didn't want to. I didn't want that for my sons. Either of them.

What had surprised me more than anything, though, had been that I didn't want Matias to live that life anymore. Although I didn't know much about Matias’s day-to-day world, I had to believe that his hunt for the man who'd nearly killed his brother had left Matias with his fair share of internal scars. The one thing I did know about Matias was that he was very protective. He'd made that clear when he'd apologized to me for not preventing the events surrounding Blake's attack on my family.

There had been absolutely no reason for the man to know what Blake had planned to do, but Matias still felt like it was his fault that the man had gotten into my house and had held a gun to my son’s head. If he had such deep emotions about an attack he'd had no way of preventing, I couldn't even imagine the mental duress he'd been experiencing since his brother had nearly died.

Matias wasn't a man who could deal with feeling helpless and out of control. If Bishop was as good at reading people as Matias had said he was, he'd know that about Matias and he'd used it to his advantage. The cat and mouse game they’d been playing had been just that, but Matias was the mouse. I wasn't sure he really understood that.

In any case, as I'd wondered what my future held if I was forced to live it on the run, I'd known there was no way I could do it. There was no way I could give up the life I'd built for Ryan. And there was no way I could live a life where death was always just around the corner. Even if it destroyed the fragile connection I had with Matias, it was what I had to do. Matias was too stubborn to see that on his own, so I’d had no choice but to set the wheels in motion myself. It'd been hard to stand up to both Matias and Ronan, but with my sons involved, there hadn't been any question about what I’d needed to do.

I knew there were a lot of logistics to work out, but I’d let Matias and Ronan deal with that. For now, I needed to figure out how to explain to Ryan that he wouldn't be seeing me for the foreseeable future. My hope was that this thing with Bishop would come to an end soon, but there was just no way to know. If my plan didn't work, I'd eventually have to call an end to the trap in which I was the bait, but I wasn't ready to think about what that would mean for me or my son. Elliot had Cruz to take care of him, so the two of them would have to make those decisions together.

I stood outside of Ryan's door for a little longer just listening to how Matias and Ryan interacted. I'd been pissed when Matias had snapped at Ryan after he’d brought up the idea of a sleepover, but hearing now how Matias was speaking to my little boy, how he was engaging with him, I was starting to realize that his reaction had been based on fear for Ryan’s safety rather than anything else. The mere fact that he was trying to make it up to my son went a long way to ease some of the anger I was feeling.

I waited a few minutes for the pair to finish up their conversation about dinosaurs before entering the room. When Matias saw me, he