Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 346(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 346(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
We both stop speaking, but my heart is racing.
“He and Cova have a past. Before she was sold to Bryant, she was with him. Not for the right reasons. Could call it a drug kidnapping. She was with a man Colt wanted to bring down, so he took her as leverage. The two of them had some twisted fuckin’ relationship, I don’t know the details. She got away from it all, only to run into Dax and be sold by him. Colt couldn’t find her, and he’s been lookin’ ever since. Don’t know what went down between the two of them, but that man has an obsession I don’t even want to try and understand.”
“How did I not know about this?” Briella asks, shaking her head.
“Because Cova don’t fuckin’ talk,” Kendric mutters.
“Exactly right,” Alarick tells her. “She don’t fuckin’ share much about her past.”
“But you could have!” Briella cries. “It would have helped to know there’s a man out there after her.”
“He ain’t goin’ to take her against her will, but he is persistent and he’s goin’ to find her, one way or another.”
“No he’s fucking not,” Briella crosses her arms.
“Not up to you to make choices for her, babe,” Alarick says, his voice a little calmer.
“She’s my sister, she’s been through enough. She doesn’t need to go with some cartel lord!”
God.
This is just too much.
I wonder what Cova thinks about all of this?
No doubt nobody will ask her. She doesn’t have choices. That’s her problem. Since she was a young girl, she hasn’t had any choices. She’s been forced to do things that she hasn’t wanted to do, sold to people. Now she’s with Briella, but again, it’s not by choice. I wonder how she’d feel if she actually got a chance to make a choice for once.
“I think you should tell her,” I say, knowing I’m about to rip off a very well stuck Band-Aid.
“What?” Briella gasps, her face scrunched with shock.
“Before you tear my head off, honey. Just listen. Cova hasn’t been given choices in a very long time. Everyone makes them for her. How are you to know what went down between the two of them? She may want to speak with him. She may not. But isn’t that her choice?”
“He’s dangerous!” Briella yells.
“No more dangerous that this club.”
Her face drops and she gives me a look that hurt, it does, because I know I’m upsetting her and I hate that. I don’t want her to hate me, and I don’t want her to be disappointed in me, but when it comes to Cova, everyone is blinded. They’re blinded by their desire to help her, which I fully understand, but I also know that when you’re being pushed and you’re in a situation you can’t even understand yourself, you’re going to push back, and you’re going to make the wrong choices.
“Look, hear me out,” I say when both Alarick and Kendric give me a look that cuts through my very soul. “I’m not saying anyone in this club is bad, not at all. I’m simply stating that if you’re going to look at that group as dangerous, you could just as easily look at this group the same way. We don’t know that the two of them had a dangerous relationship. We don’t know because we’re not giving Cova the chance to speak for herself.”
“She’s broken,” Briella argues, her voice a little less high pitched. “She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“Honey, that’s because you’re not giving her a choice. You love her, you want to help her, you’re doing everything you can to make her life better, but what you don’t understand is that you’ve taken her rights away. In protecting her, you’re wearing her down and pushing her further away from you. I think if you tell her this, if you give her a little bit of a chance to show you she can make her own choices, you’re going to gain a lot more of her respect.”
“Girl has a point,” Kendric says, holding my gaze when I swing it in his direction.
“I get what you’re saying.” Briella sighs. “I really do, but Cova is so messed up ...”
“Yeah, she is. So are the best of us. Take it from someone who has been where she is, maybe not in the same way but in a way that made me question everything. I made so many wrong choices, hell, I still do, but at the very least ... they were my choices. Every single time somebody interfered, I would push back, and I’d disappear further into myself.”
They’re all looking at me now, no doubt wondering what happened to me. I’m not about to get into it with them, but I had to use my story to make a point. Cova deserves a bit of freedom—she’s not an animal in a cage, she’s a human who has had so much taken from her.