But Lukas shakes his head. “Elena asked me to protect him. She didn’t ask me to destroy him.”
He crosses the kitchen and cups my face with both hands.
“You can still walk away, Rae. No one would blame you. Hell, most people would applaud you for having the good sense to run from a man like me.”
He thinks he’s being self-sacrificing again. But I can see the real engine behind his words. It’s the fear that I’ll finally see what he’s convinced himself he is—a monster—and leave him standing alone in this empty kitchen, in this house full of ghosts, with nothing but a half-empty whiskey glass and eighteen years of grief for company.
I think about how easy it would be. Slip out the front door, hail a cab, go home to my cramped apartment with its peeling linoleum and drafty windows. Put on sw
