had always been.
My childhood had been built on a bed of deceit and lies.
I’d be damned to have my adulthood be the same.
Callan
My life hasn’t always been an easy existence. It was an obvious truth when one saw the scars that painted my back in thin silver lines. It was a hurried guess when one came up against my quick temper after stepping over acceptable lines. It was a blatant fact when one witnessed the violence I wore like a second skin, my hands too quick to fist at even the slightest insult.
I was a walking time bomb most of the time, a dark presence, a quiet threat. In many ways, I wasn’t a good man, but I wasn’t a bad person, either.
I was something in between, a grey area where morality was questioned, a blank slate where a probable future hadn’t yet been written.
But that hadn’t always been the core of what makes me.
Not always.
And to think of the years I’d spent in the Rose mansion, a life I couldn’t remember much of in the time before this place, I had to admit that the worst sins of all that had contributed to who I became weren’t truths built from the abuse I suffered, but rather the questions I’d never thought to ask that would reveal the lies.
Standing among a crowd of people celebrating Connor’s first fight, I clutched a glass of whiskey in one hand while the other was stuffed in my pocket. I long ago lost the suit jacket I wore to the fight per Franklin’s instructions, and I’d rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt to the elbows.
Still, I felt constricted, tight, boxed in by the ridiculous desperation to keep up appearances and the incredible burden of expectations.
Staring across the room, I scanned my eyes from person to person, took in the chaos that surrounded me, the oddity of the moment.
We were surrounded by opulence, every inch of this mansion costing more than most make in a lifetime, and yet the people that filled it weren’t the well-bred and stuffy. They weren’t the faces of proper society. They were fighters and servants, whores and criminals, the life of this place changed since the night Marcus was gunned down in his own ballroom, the pulse of it more sordid and raucous than ever before.
What would Marcus think to walk into the mansion now? Worse than that, what would his prissy wife, Katrina, think to see her daughter laughing among women who sold their bodies, her arm hooked together with a gentle woman who spent her days scrubbing and polishing floors?
While they would no doubt punish her for daring to lower herself by befriending the help, I had never admired her more.
Lisbeth’s eyes snapped my direction as if she could sense me staring at her, a shy smile stretching her lips as heat colored her cheeks.
Everything male inside me woke up to look at her, every need to claim and possess, to consume and devour, to mark her body as mine, to ruin her for every other man.
I laughed to wonder what Marcus and his prim and proper wife would think if they knew their precious daughter had been well and truly debased by the servant boy who had always bowed down to her.
Shy eyes flicked back to her friends, the color deepening on Lisbeth’s cheeks that I wanted to chase down her body.
Unfortunately, that would have to be saved for later because I had another problem that demanded my attention, one I was determined to confront as soon as the opportunity was there.
Namely, the lies that still existed in the Rose mansion, the secrets and deceptions, the pretty pictures painted in effort to disguise all the ugly truths that always ran through every well-established family.
They were like an onion, I was learning. Peel one layer back and you reveal another, each one more toxic than the last.
It occurred to me that a particular face was missing among the revelry, the one man whose life mission had been to see to it that the Rose name was never tarnished. He should have arrived a little after us, yet an hour had passed, and he still hadn’t walked through the door.
I was surrounded by Jacob, Connor and Benny, their voices background noise to my thoughts. Their laughter a contrast to the anger that rode me.
Turning to Jacob, I nudged his elbow with mine, our eyes meeting as I tipped my head away from the group in a silent