mind runs away with her again. “Are you afraid?” Stella asks her.
“No,” she answers, surprising herself with her lack of hesitation.
“Are you going to ask me for mercy on them?” Stella asks her.
“No,” she replies, again without hesitation though her hands tremble.
“It doesn’t make you a bad person,” Stella says as if reading her inner turmoil. “You watched someone you love be wronged. You’ve been wronged. Over and over again in the most horrific way. By your own family.”
“Is that why you brought me here?” she asks Stella. “To…watch?”
“I brought you here to understand and to give you the truth. I brought you here to save my family. You are a part of that family now too,” Stella says.
“I know what I’m doing isn’t going to fix the damage done between me and Derrick. I know what I’m about to do doesn’t even have to be done but I’m choosing to kill them and their men anyway. It’s the darker part of me. It’s knowing that I have the power to take my fury out on others and I’m using that power to snuff out a life. It’s me seeking my own justice. It’s me adding more red to my ledger. Do you understand?”
Her head nods of its own volition. And damn it all but she did understand. She wants that same kind of justice for herself! She’d dream of someone stepping in and handing that justice to her. Why not try and do what no one else has for herself?
“It’s also me owning up to this, Ari. See, I’m the one that set these events in motion. I opened a door and brought fire into my own home. Even though it also brought us you as well, Ari. With all of this, you and Adam found each other.”
“I don’t think it will change what I think of you,” she tells her friend the truth even though she doesn’t quite understand why Stella is blaming herself for what Isabella and Cristian did. Stella has such a good heart. A true matriarch to the King family.
“Thank you,” she tells her friend. “For telling me the truth. For always treating me…like a human being.”
“You never should have been treated beneath anyone else,” Stella retorts with her outrageously innocent smile, even during a bleak time like this.
“Stella, what about the arrangement between the Kings and Romano?” She had to ask. There isn’t much she can do to protect the family but she still needs to know that she isn’t putting them in immediate danger either.
“Don’t worry about that. As long as you love Adam as much as he loves you, it’ll all work out in the end,” Stella tells her with conviction.
Does Adam love her?
He’s so hard to read that sometimes she’s sure of it yet, she couldn’t be sure. He’s never spoken the words but then, neither has she. It wasn’t until they’ve had to spend these past weeks apart that she discovered how much she feels for him.
Beyond attachment and familiarity. Beyond physical need and want. Beyond the control and submission. It’s more torturous than coming off of whatever blend Cristian had stuffed into her.
“I love him, Stella. So much,” she whispers out the words for the first time.
“You should tell him. These Kings are dense when it comes to love sometimes. They won’t believe it until you start hammering it into their heads. They’re worth it though,” Stella says with a gentle smile even though her eyes are filled with so much pain and sadness.
“Listen,” Stella says. “In about five minutes, your half-siblings…wait. I’m going to stop calling them that because I don’t want to consider them even on your level.”
She laughs at Stella for the perfect valley girl act.
“Anyway, those two will be brought in here. They won’t be walking out. You can stay if you want to but this is on me. You don’t need to be here. Brooks is ready to take you back immediately without them knowing you were ever here.” Stella pauses. “And Ari, I can’t promise it’ll be easy and painless.”
“I’ll,” she pauses and tries to convince herself to change her mind. It doesn’t budge. Something in her needs to be here. “I’m staying,” she says.
Does this…does this make her evil? Does she have her own darkness stirring within, her own bloodlust?
“You’re still butterflies and rainbows, Ari.”
How does Stella do that? How does Stella seem to know what she’s thinking? Just like Adam seems to.
“That darkness that you feel sometimes? It’s they who brought