Arranged love

CROSS

I TURN TO look down at the jackass who almost ruined my best friend’s life. I don’t know much about the kid, but he can’t even be twenty-one yet. He cost Grave fifty grand months back when the Mason brothers were after him. Grave paid them off, and he was to pay Grave back. I’m not sure how that’s been going. I haven’t asked. Maybe I should have. “Come on.” I grab his upper arm and yank him to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” He tries to pull away from me, but I keep hold of him.

“Yeah, I’m taking you to rehab.”

“Fuck that!” he shouts, starting to fight me harder, but he’s still too weak. I picked him up off the floor at the Airport. He had two fights tonight and got his ass kicked both times. Trey Mason, the youngest of the three brothers, had to help me get Ethan to my car. “You never stopped him from doing drugs.”

I grip his face with my free hand. “Your sister has been through enough.”

“She made her choices,” he spits out.

I’m going to fucking kill this kid.

Bones pulls me away from him and shoves his back in the front door. “Get the fuck away from here. I don’t care if you go to rehab or go get fucked up. But stay the fuck away from April and Grave, or I’ll kill you myself.”

He shrugs off him, turns around, and slams the front door shut on his way out.

“He needed rehab,” I bark at Bones.

“You can’t force someone to choose sobriety, Cross,” he snaps. “You of all people should know that.”

I do, but … “She just lost her child. How do you think she’ll feel if she loses a brother to an overdose?”

He shrugs. “Looks like she’ll be better off.”

Alexa gasps at his words, but I’m not surprised that’s how Bones feels. And I can’t say that I disagree. But I’m also thinking of Grave here. April is his everything. What will he do if she leaves him? If she loses a child and a brother? How will that affect her? And then their relationship? I’m trying to make sure I do my part to keep all sides together. I hate to admit it, but I was never there for Grave like he needed me to be. I enabled him. I’m trying to do better. Be a better friend for him now. And I’ll be damned if I let myself fail.

“How did you know it was Ethan?” Jasmine asks me.

I look up at her, and a conversation I had with Grave comes to mind.

“You lost them again?” I ask Grave as I stand in his bedroom up in our Royal Suite at Kingdom.

“I had them in a bag,” he growls, shuffling through his closet.

I’m not sure what he’s looking for exactly. I fall on the end of his bed. “And you didn’t take them?” How do you lose a bottle of pills?

He snorts. “I would know if I had taken an entire bottle of pills last night.”

I shrug, flipping my Zippo open and closed. “Maybe April took them.” I reach, trying to think of the options. I don’t know anything about this woman. Maybe she does drugs. He does them all the time with his go-to fuck-Lucy.

Grave shakes his head. “One, she didn’t know they were there, and two, she wouldn’t have had the chance. She sucked my dick on the way to her house, and the moment we arrived, we went upstairs to her room. After we were done, she passed out and never left. It had to have been her brother.”

What was in the pill bottle wasn’t what Grave used to keep in there. It’s obvious that Ethan had finished off the pills he stole and then refilled it with whatever he wanted, keeping the bottle.

“Cross?” Alexa speaks, reminding me that Jasmine asked me a question, but I ignore them. Instead, I kick the jackass’s bag across the foyer that he left behind and turn to the door. Yanking it open and slamming it shut behind me, I head to my house. I’m tired and need a shower. We have a compound here in a cul-de-sac right outside of Las Vegas. It’s been a while since I’ve stayed at my house, but right now, I don’t want to take the time to go to Kingdom.

“Cross?” I hear Alexa call out behind me, running down Grave’s stairs.

“Not now,” I say, not wanting her around. I want to be alone for the night. “Go home, Alexa.”

“Cross!” she shouts.

I enter my house and slam that door as well, but it instantly swings open behind me. I should have locked it, but since we live in a gated community that only we Kings have access to, I never do.

“I’m fucking talking to you!” she shouts.

I spin around to face her. “And I told you to go home!”

She crosses her arms over her chest. Things got intense, and my blood pressure is still rising. My anger is far from faded. How long would Grave had let April think he was using again? She would have left him. All because he wanted to spare the truth of her brother. Pitiful. What the fuck was he thinking? I yank off my jacket and turn, walking down the hallway to my master suite at the back of the house.

“We need to discuss this,” she states.

I snort. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“That is her brother.”

“Bones was right,” I say, entering the bedroom.

“Did you do that to Grave? Huh?” she demands, causing me to pause and turn to face her. “Did you leave him to overdose?”

“You have no idea what the fuck has happened!” I shout. “What he went through. What I allowed to happen. None of us could have stopped him!” I believe in my heart that April was the only one to make Grave want to sober up. “What do you expect from me?”

“How about a little human decency?” she screams in my face. “Some compassion. He needed help, not to be kicked out of the house and left on his own on the streets. He’ll just go find more drugs.”

I laugh at that, and it just fuels her hate for me at the moment.

“You Kings say that you’re all brothers. But you allowed Grave to get high. What if he had overdosed? Huh? Then what …?”NôvelDrama.Org owns this text.

“Don’t act like you know what happened, Alexa. Because I promise you, you don’t know shit.” I step into her, glaring down my nose into her green eyes. “This is the last time I’m going to say this. Get the fuck out of my house.”

Her jaw sharpens, her nostrils flare, and I think she’s going to slap me, but instead, she spins around and marches out of my room, slamming the front door on her way out.

“FUCK!”