DECEIT (B723) by Hazel Grace (ebook reader for surface pro .TXT) 📕

is making sure my husband gets out of this and my debt is now paid in full.

Bishop probably helped fuck that up but at least Kai won’t ask me for another solid again.

The music never stops the whole time that I have a front-row seat to watching Bishop beat up on random guys.

When no one else approaches him, he pivots and lifts me off the bar without a word. He holds my hand tightly on the way home and I dare not start a conversation.

I thought I was beginning to understand my husband.

I was fully aware of how standoffish he was and how emotions weren’t easy.

But the Kace Bishop that tackled me in Mills’s condo complex, I’m not quite sure I know this individual at all.

I think I broke him.

I’ve impatiently stalked Emmy all night.

And when that friend of hers brought her to a dive bar that looks like it was about to collapse on itself at any moment, I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait in the car.

I gave the asshole who kept his greedy arm wrapped around her waist thirty seconds to remove it. Then another thirty when Emmy was grabbed by the bald guy.

I wanted to give her space to handle her own shit.

To repay this debt that she owed him because of my rage episode with Mills. I wasn’t going to coddle, bitch, or step in…until two men touched what was mine.

I let Kai slide because of his mission, but when he couldn’t bring the dickhead in front of him to get his damn hands off my wife, it was game over.

Plus, I’m pissed.

Everything that’s going on is hard to handle. Typically when we have a problem, we obliterate it and move on our way, but there are babies involved and they’re not just any kids.

They’re the love of my life’s children.

Ones I’ve held and quickly bonded with. Atlas and Alaric are Emmy, tiny remnants of her DNA and heart.

And I’m a fucking wreck for everything Emmy has dealt with because I don’t want her to turn cold like me.

If she pushed me away, I’d follow her.

If she demanded that she want to do this—raise her children independently without any involvement from me or B723, I wouldn’t listen.

I respect Emmy but not her independence to shut me out when a darkness is beginning to form that I know all too well.

I’m not strong enough to not fall down in the deep end with her if she drowns because she only needs to say the word, and I’ll eliminate him and everyone he knows.

I don’t want to push but I’m worried about how she’s handling it.

At the coffee shop, she appeared distant. No longer did she smile or have that glimmer of happiness in her brown eyes after speaking with her douchebag ex.

They were dead and dark.

And while she runs around and plays Robin to someone else’s Batman, I sat back and watch her blow off steam to manage whatever is going on in her head.

Except for when I couldn’t take it anymore.

I can’t do a fucking thing without thinking of her. And I can’t stand when she’s not talking to me.

It irks me to no fucking end.

In the hotel room that Emmy booked for us, she doesn’t say a word the whole twenty minutes back from the bar. She didn’t bitch at me for carrying her out like a caveman and she didn’t complain when I buckled her in like she couldn’t do it her damn self.

Tossing her purse on one of the white sectional couches, she begins going through her cell and brings it to her ear.

I allow my eyes to soak in the emerald green dress that hugs her perfect ass and how she stretches on her tiptoes to stretch. She rubs at one of her temples, looking clearly distressed until someone answers the phone on the other line.

“Hey,” she greets with a beaming smile and tone. “Sorry, I’m late.”

She’s forgotten or doesn’t care that I’m in the room, which doesn’t bother me as she paces the front of the couch.

It gives me a minute to evaluate her behavior and body language.

“It got messy, but I’m fine,” she recites, raking her hand through her short hair. “I know, I’m…figuring it out.”

Emmy blows out a breath, hollowing out her cheeks as she rights herself and straightens her spine against whatever or whoever she’s arguing with.

I want to pluck her cell out of her hands and crush it under my heel, but I’m trying to give her that said space she needs.

It’s what I’d want.

Studying her and recalling everything that’s happened in the last two months, I know that I’m hers in every sense of the word.

Everything that is me—dark, deep, and fucked up—is Emmy’s.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Emmy conveys, then pulls her phone from her face and glances down at it. She suddenly glows, lips curled in the most enthusiastic smile as she waves her fingers at the screen. And I know she’s video chatting with her kids. “Oh, my sweetheart, hello!”

A cooing sounds in the room and then Mill’s voice. “All she does is eat, Ems. The woman acts like she doesn’t every two minutes.”

I envy how my so-called buddy knows more about those kids than I do. That he gets to spend all his time bonding with them, and I’ve only had moments. How he and Emmy work so perfectly together that, if Mills was the father, she’d never have to worry about a thing.

“You might have to up her ounces,” she tells him, plopping carelessly down on the couch. “Is Alaric the same?”

“Nah, dude is mellowed out as shit. Unlike the man he was named after.”

That gets me to smirk as I lean over the white granite island and cover my mouth with my hand.

“Where is that asshole?”

“Eavesdropping on our conversation,” my wife tells him without glancing over at me. No, she knows my eyes are always glued on her because she’s the only damn thing I see. “You hear