Roman

"I'll tell you about my mother," I said before I could stop myself.

I was treading on dangerous territory. If I said too much about my family, then she might guess that I was Roman Tyrell, not Roman Lettiere as I had told her yesterday. I don't know why I had lied about my surname. No, I do. I hadn't wanted to see her eyes fill with judgment at the cursed name Tyrell. Besides, it wasn't that much of a lie. Lettiere had been my mother's maiden name. I had always felt like a Lettiere instead of a Tyrell.

"My mother was fierce," Julianna said softly, "she stood up for what she believed in. She loved me and my father with a steady ferocity. She'd do anything for us."

Julianna could have been speaking about herself. "It sounds like your mother was an incredible woman."

She nodded, her eyes still facing forward. "I struggle to follow in her shadow."

"I doubt that."

She let out a long breath. "Your turn," she said quietly.

My turn. I had agreed to give her a piece of my soul for one of hers. I felt my heart turn to steel the way it did when things hurt too much. "My mother was a good woman who was cursed to fall in love and marry the wrong man." Even I could hear the bitterness in my own voice.

She had been cursed to love my father, a man whose ambition endangered her life and eventually killed her. "I've never stopped missing her," I admitted.

"Me too," she said.

"I don't think you ever really get used to it."

She nodded. "Every event for the rest of my life will be overshadowed by the hole she left behind."

"Every birthday."

"Each Christmas," she agreed. Something flashed in her eyes. "Whose funeral did you go to yesterday?"

"My eldest brother."

Her face fell. "I'm so sorry."

I shrugged, even though the loss of him fisted in my belly. Jacob and I had not seen eye to eye for a long time, but I loved him like only a brother could. Once upon a time I had worshiped him like only a youngerbrother could.

"Were you close?"

"Once. When we were younger. Then he changed. I didn't like what he became." The man they buried yesterday wasn't the Jacob I knew and loved. The truth was, I had missed him for over a decade. For me, the real Jacob died that summer he turned sixteen—the summer my mother died—and my father began to groom him to take over our family business. I had been twelve.

Through my youthful eyes, Jacob became something I didn't recognize. I watched him morph into one of the monsters that crawled out of one of the stories that he used to read to me before bed. He became a ball of learned rage and hatred. Of eye-for-an-eye justice. Of self-righteous fury.

Our relationship changed. I was no longer the little brother he would protect with his life. He no longer trusted me, taught by our father never to trust anyone, not even his own blood. I became a threat to his future throne.

It was only a matter of time for me to follow him down that dark path…

Julianna's hand fell upon my arm. Her touch sent waves of heat through my body. She was like a ray of sunshine cutting through the fog I'd been drifting around in for the last fourteen years. If she knew what she was doing to me, she didn't show it.

"Sometimes that's harder," she said. "Trying to mourn someone still alive who doesn't look like the person you loved."

I looked up at her and studied her face. Underneath the flawless features was a sadness, an empathy beyond sensing another person's sadness. She knew. She understood.

"My brother and I," I began, "…it's complicated."

"It always is with family."

"Do you have brothers? Sisters?" I asked.

"No. It's just me and my father now."

"And as the only child, the weight of family expectations falls right on your pretty little shoulders."

"Indeed," she said quietly.