Resonance of Stars (Greenstone Security #5) - Anne Malcom Page 0,83
was thankful for it. I didn’t want hands on me, didn’t even want to be inside my own skin, but there was no choice in that.
We were silent for a while, the sound of the rain on the roof both a roar and a whisper.
“I didn’t think about it,” I said after a while.
Duke looked toward me, I could see that in my peripheral. I kept staring at the rain, at the darkness it was welcoming in. Was it night? Or did the day just welcome darkness once in a while?
“At Greenstone, I thought about it,” I said. “About the murder, about what it meant for me, of course. I didn’t give much thought to Salvador. Isn’t that horrible? I was sleeping with him, I watched him be murdered and I didn’t shed a single tear. That’s something off. Something wrong. You saw it from the start.”
“Baby—”
I held up my hand. “No. It’s okay. I’m a big girl. You didn’t like me because you had no reason to. I wasn’t likeable. The only person that liked me, not the characters I played, not what I could do for them, not who they thought of me, was Andre. He knew who I was and he liked me anyway.” I thought back to that night in the parking lot. “He saved my life,” I said quietly. “He didn’t even ask me where I wanted to go after I gave my statement. He drove me straight to Greenstone.” I looked at Duke’s eyes now. “To you. He was the reason for this. And then we got here and I forgot it all, the why of it all. I was just here and I let myself linger in that. Now Andre’s dead and I’ll never not think about it.”
“Anastasia,” Duke said, his voice harsher now.
“What did you tell your brother?” I asked. “He heard all of it. He’s smart enough to come to conclusions close enough to the truth.”
Something moved in Duke’s face. Surprise, maybe. He was likely expecting the breakdown now, the tears. But maybe not.
“He already knew,” he said after a pause. A long one.
I stared at him in shock. “He already knew?” I repeated.
Duke nodded. “Both he and my father knew.”
“From the start?” I clarified. “They both knew from the start that this wasn’t real? That I was a job for you?”
Duke flinched, and I knew he’d try to cage me in, to grab me. For once, I was quicker than him. Even in my grief, even with the whisky in me, I was quicker.
I put the chair between us and made it very clear I didn’t want him near me.
He glowered at the chair. Then at me.
“You were never a mission for me, and you know that,” he said slowly. “This has been real since the second you set foot on Hammond dirt.”
I tilted my head, trying to weigh that statement for truth and lies, but I didn’t know the difference between them anymore.
“Why did you make me pretend then?” I yelled. “Did you guys all have a good laugh over beers, knowing the truth?”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he clipped. “I told them because I needed them to be aware, to protect you when I wasn’t around. They’re the only people I trust with you.”
“No,” I said, quiet now. “No, that’s not it. You couldn’t lie to them about something like this. Maybe you could lie to your mother and grandmother because you had some warped idea that you were protecting them, even though your grandmother knew something was up from the beginning. But you weren’t doing it to have them protect me. You were doing it because you couldn’t lie to them. You were doing that because you hated me at the start of this, and you didn’t want your father to be ashamed of you thinking I was the woman you picked to bring home.”
“I didn’t hate you,” Duke said after another long fricking pause.
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t even attempt to try to tell me I was wrong about the rest—because I wasn’t.
It seemed totally pointless to be having this argument in the midst of what I’d lost, but at the same time the anger was something more tangible to hold on to. A lifeboat in the middle of stormy seas.
It did make my emotions more powerful. That and the whisky.
Which was what had me darting to the French doors and sprinting out into the rain, barefoot.