Black Lilith: Book One (Black Lilith #1) (22 page)

“I didn’t know I could do the splits,” she says.

Logan laughs, pressing his face into her neck and letting his shoulders shake with it. He pulls her into a hug and rolls over, pulling out of her and arranging her so that they are wrapped around each other.

“Goddam, Mikayla Strong, I can’t believe I lived this long without you.”

When they reached Washington, it all fell apart.

Mikayla and Logan went on in secret, meeting when they could. Every time they came together, it was intense and passionate, and Mikayla began to think that no man would ever compare to Logan. The way he made her feel—as though she were something beautiful and precious, as though she were everything he could ever want and more—took her breath away.

And then they would be in public, and he would ignore her. Or send her lingering glances before turning away prior to someone noticing. Or glaring at Tommy, Dash, and Slate when they sat next to her. The more they went on, the more she began to feel like Logan’s dirty little secret. When she wasn’t basking in the afterglow of another brilliant love-making session, she was walking on eggshells wondering if he would fire her for messing up the schedules or getting an interview wrong. In her worst moods, Mikayla wondered if he would fire her just to keep their affair from going public.

She could have handled his hot and cold moods if they hadn’t been part of a massive deception—a deception which forced her to lie to the rest of the band. At night, when she wasn’t curled up in Logan’s arms, her mind would conjure images of
Black Lilith
’s members, rearranging their features into what she thought they would look like if confronted with what Mikayla and Logan were doing.

One night, after a long day of interviews, the band and Mikayla get together in Dash and Logan’s room and order room service. The room is easily big enough for all five of them, though Mikayla finds herself pressed up against Slate on Dash’s bed.

“Let’s play a game!” Slate says, clapping his hands together. “Never Have I Ever.”

The other band members groan.

“Slate, we’ve played that game a million times. We all know everything about each other.”

“Mik doesn’t. Besides, I want to know all of the juicy details
she’s
been hiding.”

“What makes you think I’ve been hiding something?” Mikayla asks a note quivering in her voice.

Slate shrugs and gives her a shark-like grin. “You’re too buttoned up, my dear. Women like you always have secrets.”

You have no idea
, she thought about saying.

Logan pours them all shots of beer, shooting a warning look to Mikayla as he does.
‘Don’t get too drunk,’
that look seems to be saying,
‘don’t tell them something we’ll regret.
’ As if she could forget.

Tommy goes first.

“Never have I ever broken my leg trying and failing to rescue a cat from a tree.”

Dash takes a shot. “I didn’t fail. The cat came down.”

“Because you scared it off with your screaming,” Logan says.

Then it’s Dash’s turn. “Never have I ever done butt stuff,” he says.

“Giving or receiving?” Slate asks.

“Either.”

Slate takes the shot.

“If you
really
want to know—” he begins.

Mikayla cuts him off. “We really don’t,” she says.

A laugh rolls around the group. Mikayla feels light and giddy, almost like she’s a teenager again. She rolls herself into the blankets and settles in, watching the men of
Black Lilith
trying to get each other drunk, only taking shots herself when something applies to her.

“Never have I ever had a sister,” Logan says.

Slate, Dash, and Tommy all take a shot.

“Well, that doesn’t make sense,” she says, looking between Dash and Logan.

Logan is giving the others a confused look as well. “Tommy, you don’t have a sister!”

“Sure I do,” Tommy says, shrugging. He points at Mikayla. “She’s right there.”

And suddenly the tone in the room shifts dramatically. Mikayla goes from giddy and cheerful to overwhelmed. Maybe it’s the beer, or the knowledge that she’s been lying to them for weeks, but when Slate and Dash both nod along with Tommy she feels tears prickling at the corners of her eyes and a lump rise in her throat.

“Oh, hey… Mik, don’t cry!” Tommy says, leaning over Slate to pull her into a hug. Mikayla wraps her arms around his shoulders and buries her face in his neck, trying to keep the tears at bay.

Mikayla had not spoken to her mother since the phone call that Logan had walked in on. She’s almost resigned herself to the fact that this may be something that she and her mother can’t come back from. That regardless of their blood ties, and how much Mikayla loves her mother, she can’t keep such a toxic presence in her life anymore. She’d thought that she would have to resign herself to being without a family.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” she says, sniffling and pulling away from Tommy. All of the men are looking at her with concern. Logan, in particular, seems to be physically restraining himself from jumping over the beds and pulling her into his arms.

But he won’t. Because they’re meant to be a secret.

She shakes her head and gives Tommy a watery smile. “Sorry, I’m on my period.”

That does it. The tone shifts again as Tommy, Slate and Dash all cover their ears, howling their disapproval. It seems that no matter how old men get, they still freak out at the thought of a shedding uterus. She could admit to using that to her advantage more than once in her adult life.

Later in the evening, when everyone has gone to bed, Logan finds Mikayla in her room.

“Dash thinks I’m at the pool,” he says, closing the door behind him. “Are you okay? I know you’re not on your period. Did your mom call again?”

Mikayla is in her robe. She showered when she’d returned to her room, letting the hot water run down her back as she rehearsed what she would say to Logan when she saw him next.

“Logan, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she says. Her heart is pounding in her ears—speeding up when his shoulders tense and the muscles beneath his tattoos shift. She loves those tattoos. She’ll miss running her fingers over them.

“What do you mean?” he asks. His voice is low and even, but there’s a wobble on the end that makes Mikayla want to close her eyes and take it back.

She doesn’t. “I mean I don’t think I can keep lying to the others about us,” she says. “It’s just… I care about them. I hate lying to them.”

“The rules—”

“
Fuck
the rules,” she says. She crosses her arms over her chest and stares at her feet. “They’re only there because
you
made them. If you wanted to, you could just go to the others and tell them you made a mistake.”

Logan shakes his head, frowning. “It’s not that simple—”

“It is!” she says. “It really is! What am I supposed to think, Logan? We’ve spent more time hiding this relationship than we’ve spent actually being in one, and I’m getting really tired of being made to feel ashamed every time I kiss you.”

“You’re ashamed.” It’s not a question, just a repetition.

Mikayla sits on the edge of her mattress. It’s soft and lush, as all of the five-star mattresses are, though the rest of the room is hard lines and bright lamps. She prefers the hotel they stayed in during the London leg of the tour, it had more character. It felt like a home. This just feels like limbo. It seems that no matter what, she can’t shake the feeling of not belonging.

But Tommy makes her feel like she belongs. Dash and Slate took the shot of beer as well, declaring her their sister without words.

“Aren’t you?” Mikayla asks. “You act like you are. The amount of effort you put into hiding what we have… that’s shame, right?”

“I just don’t want to deal with what the others will say,” Logan says, stepping into the room properly and sitting with her on the bed. He tries to reach out and take her hand, but she stuffs both of her hands under her armpits so that he can do nothing but let his own fall limply at his sides. “They’ll never let me hear the end of it, especially Tommy.”

“Well, after the way you treated him and Danielle, I can imagine why,” she says.

His shoulders tense again. “That’s… there were circumstances.”

“Yeah! She messed up a schedule or something,” says Mikayla. She gives him a hard look. “Is that why you’re keeping us a secret? So that when I mess up you can fire me without a second thought?”

“How can you—” His voice starts to raise, and he forces himself to stop. She watches as he seems to gather himself, taking a long breath in through his nose and out through his mouth. “That’s
not
what happened with Danielle.”

“That’s what you told Tommy.”

“Yeah,” he says.

She feels herself growing tense. There’s something anticipatory in the air now, but different from the usual anticipation she feels in Logan’s presence. What has he been hiding?

“What have you been hiding?” she asks.

Logan runs a hand through his hair and sighs heavily. “Mikayla—”

“Tell me now or leave and never come back,” she says fiercely. He looks at her with surprise, but she holds her ground. “You either trust me enough to tell me the truth, or you don’t. But don’t you dare try to hedge or weasel your way out of making a decision.”

Logan stares at her for a moment. His soft brown eyes are turned down at the edges as he runs a hand over his forearm, over his tattoos. Finally, he sighs and shakes his head at the ground.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. You want to know the truth? I fired Danielle because she was stealing money from us.”

Mikayla doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t that. “You told Tommy—”

“I know what I told Tommy,” he says, his tone a study in barely controlled frustration. “What was I supposed to say?
‘Sorry, dude, the love of your life is actually a white-collar criminal who’s been scamming us for months?’
You know he’d take it personally.”

She takes a moment to let that sink in. She imagines Tommy—sweet, kind, open-hearted Tommy—giving his everything to a woman only to find out that she was taking advantage of him. Logan’s right; Tommy would be crushed if he knew the truth. If this even
was
the truth.

“How did you find out about it?” she asks. “Why not someone at
Bass Note
, or one of the others?”

“It was right after our first big signing deal,” Logan replies. “Money was coming in, but none of us knew what to do with it, so we just sort of put it all in one account. We figured we’d live as we always had, and just use the money for big stuff. But as we were getting bigger I thought, maybe Dash might like to go to college after all.” His breath hitches and Mikayla needs to restrain herself from reaching out to him. “He wouldn’t leave the band, he’s too loyal, but there’re night schools. I thought I could finally give him that, and I knew that Slate and Tommy would let me.” He runs his hand through his hair again. “But when I opened the accounts to see what I had to work with, I saw the figures. Way less than what they should have been. Most of the expenses seemed reasonable… guitars, tour buses, and all that stuff. But the expenses on the statements didn’t match what I knew we had. I didn’t remember buying half that stuff, or getting any of it from
Bass Note
, so I asked Danielle about it.”

His tone shifts and Mikayla sees a glint of fury behind his eyes.

“She was too cagey. I did some digging, and I realized what she’d been doing. But I couldn’t tell Tommy. I couldn’t do that to him.”

She shakes her head at him. “So you’d rather lie to his face and make him hate you?”

“Better he hates me than hate himself.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Mikayla says. A thought occurs to her. “That’s why you don’t trust me.”

“I do—”

“You don’t.” Mikayla stands up then. She needs to be in motion, she needs to be doing
something, because sitting still while her mind is a swirling mess of emotions is unbearable. “You never did. That’s why you didn’t let me access
Black Lilith
’s accounts when we met.”

“Fool me once,” Logan replies. He’s watching her from the bed with his fists clenched on his thighs. “Then you saved Dash, and I thought—”