me.
“I pity the woman who ends up with you, Mackson King,” Lana seethes. And there goes any apology I may have had on the tip of my tongue. “Yes, I got the key tattoo. But I got it as a reminder, so I would never forget that words are cheap, lies are everywhere, and trust is for fools.”
Lana lifts up one side of her shorts and shows me the tattoo clearly. It’s beautiful. The bow of the key has an intricate design that flows all the way to the tip, where six cuts are made into buildings. They appear to be drawn to look like castles and beneath the key in calligraphy are the words, ‘Once Upon A Time.’
“Love is just that… a fairytale. Stories, which came from someone’s imagination and not from our world because it’s not real.”
Hearing Lana’s unemotional voice, I force my eyes away from the tattoo and to her face.
“You had love, real love and then you fucked it up, Lana. You weren’t strong enough to hold onto it,” I say the last part gently because no matter how much anger I have for her, her insecurities back then weren’t her fault. They were her father’s, but as much as I’d love to lay all the blame on Jae, he didn’t force Lana into bed with another man.
A sarcastic laugh bursts from Lana’s mouth. “Real love? Well, Mack, if you had have told me five years ago that real love was killing my father, disappearing and never coming back, then fuck I would’ve held tight to that love.”
“I came back for you,” I reply sharply.
How fucking dare she blame me for us falling apart?
I’m no goddamned saint, but I’m not the one who decided we were done.
Lana’s whole body locks up at my words. “You did not,” she says quickly.
“Yeah, I did. Right, when I saw just how weak you were. When you took Corey fucking Lowe to your bed.”
Lana stumbles a few steps and grabs hold of the bed frame. “You came back?”
Chapter Three
Lana
He came back? It’s strange, a heart I thought dead long ago begins to skip a beat.
My mouth dries instantly and suddenly my chest refuses to inhale or exhale. The day my father died was the last time I saw Mackson King. He never called, he at no time wrote, and he never came back. His betrayal was like a knife being twisted in my spine. Slow twists—the first was to gain my attention, the second to get me to care, the third when he had me fall in love with him. And the last—the most fatal twist of all—was when he had me believing in myself.
And now he’s saying he did return, and at the worst possible time too. He’d not answered one of my calls, returned any of my text messages, and Slater had admitted to killing my father. I begged Mack for a reason; I told him I’d understand. All I needed to know was why. An answer to my question, it was something I deserved.
It was two months later when Rex finally told me Slater’s reasoning for killing my father. A reason my brother fervently denied could ever be true. I didn’t know what to believe, but I would at no time stand up for my father whether he was innocent or not. He never earned that right from me.
But Mack gave me nothing, not a single word back to give me hope that I hadn’t just been fooled in the worst possible way. I was shattered, my brother broken and promising revenge on the one who killed our father and their entire family, one of those men I loved deeply.
It had been three weeks, with no word from Mack, and Corey was just there. Right time, wrong frame of mind. Corey had been there my entire life and he’d cared for me long before I knew it.
I never could see past Mackson King.
It was a moment of weakness, one of many in my life. It’s taken me close to five years to build up what my father stripped away from me. I didn’t have confidence instilled in me from birth like my friends. I never had a parent tell me that time passes and hurts would fade. My positive experiences all boiled down to seconds, minutes and hours with Mackson, and he broke my heart into a million pieces.
“I knew Jae messed with your mind, but to do that to me? I made promises to you Lana,