Page 62 of Let the Game Begin

“Logan!”

I turned and saw Selene. Her voice was like the only properly tuned note in an otherwise discordant melody.

Babygirl ran to my brother with tears in her eyes. For a moment, I thought I was having a hallucination and that my imagination was playing tricks on me. But then I got a whiff of that coconut scent that I would have recognized anywhere, and I knew that it was all real.

Thatshewas real.

“Everything’s okay, Selene.” Logan embraced her and reassured her as best he could. Meanwhile, my head had started to spin again, and I felt an instinctive need to lean back against the scraped-up wall behind me. The police could be there any minute, but I lacked the strength to run.

Still reeling, I looked into Selene’s terrified face and found the crystalline ocean of her eyes. She was staring at me like I was a lunatic, a serial killer, fucked in the head. And maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong about that.

Did she witness some of that horrifying scene from before?

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. I wanted to know why my brother had the bright idea of bringing her along with him and showing her what I really was. Not just a callous man who manipulated women into fucking him, not even just a self-centered, calculating cynic. No, I was something much worse than that, and from the way Selene was looking at me, I could guess that she knew it now, too.

“She insisted on coming. I didn’t want her to, but she was worried about you,” Logan explained. I smiled at his response.

Babygirl was worried about me?

Only because she didn’t know then what I really was.

I kicked off the wall and approached Tinkerbell as though she were an oasis and I was a man dying of thirst. Selene held my gaze steadily while Logan gestured for me to follow him to his car as soon as possible because the police were still on their way.

I, however, was transfixed.

“What did you see?” She jumped when I reached her and spoke softly. She still looked unsettled and afraid.

She gulped, her long auburn hair falling gently around her shoulders. I wanted to touch it, but I forced myself to hold still and wait. I expected her to go off on me, tell me that I was crazy or dangerous or unfit for regular society, but instead she just examined my face discreetly.

“I saw a brother. Trying, in his own way, to punish his sister’s abuser because family is everything to him.”

Those words, so simple and so true, stupefied me. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since last night when we were together. I’d fucked her brutally over a desk, and yet, there was no hate in her eyes, no bitterness. Just understanding and maybe even a bit of compassion. She was so little, but she contained such incredible strength.

She was a tigress, that much was for certain.

But how long would she be able to tolerate my insanity before losing her own mind?

“Why are you making excuses for me?” I asked irritably. I wanted her to see me for who I really was. Everyone was afraid of me; everyone kept the appropriate distance from me. They knew that I was rough. They knew that I often slipped outside the bounds of “normal” behavior, and that I was a constant fuckup.

I hadenjoyedbeating the shit out of Carter.

And now this girl was looking at me like I was some kind of hero, keeping the world safe from the monsters. I was no one’s hero, though. Maybe she looked at me and saw Batman, but in reality, I was the Joker.

In reality, my life was not a comic book.

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” she whispered.

I stared at her lips, red and parted. They formed the shape of a heart. I wanted to kiss them, lick them, and taste them like I’d been doing a few hours before. All at once, I couldn’t help but wonder what a creature like her was doing in the middle of my tortured path. I knew that all good things came to an end, and it was almost never a happy one. So I needed to watch my back or Selene would be the end of me.

God had shown me nothing but cruelty since the day I was born, and I firmly believed that she had been sent by a higher power to break me down even further.

But did God think he’d gotten me with this one?

He was wrong.

He wasn’t going to fuck me again. Instead, I was going to be the one fucking his ocean-eyed angel as many times as I wanted, even if she wasn’t blond or slutty like my usual girls.

“We need to leave right now,” Logan urged us, glancing around worriedly. But I didn’t stop watching Selene. Her gaze slipped down to my hands. I followed her eye line and saw the blood on my knuckles, the purple-looking stains on my jeans and my rumpled sweater.