Nativity: Festive Novella (Heart of Stone #11) Read Online Free Page B

“is a quote from Saint Augustine.” I stared
at her. She’d gone crazy. “Thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart is not
quiet until it rests in thee.”
    My eyes widened on her. “What?”
    Closing her eyes, she shook her head
sadly. “I discovered many things from my time locked up with Rebecca, Mason.”
    What the fuck?
    “And the one that finally hit home for
me,” she whispered almost sorrowfully, “is that you create in us what you want
for you. You manipulated Rebecca until she was nothing but a shell of who she
once was. All that controlled her was you, her need to make you happy. Her,
almost primal, behaviour was nothing
more than a woman’s natural instinct to fight for her man.”
    I stared at her, my heart slowing as her
words hit me with the force of a hurricane. She cupped my face gently with her
hand, a small soft smile tilting her lips as her love for me shone brightly in
her stunning green depths. “Yet, through all the years I have been with you, I
know for sure that you are unaware of your power over anyone. Hell, even I
didn’t see it until a couple of years ago. Your natural character is made that
way, Mason. It’s nothing you do specifically but you feed us, nurture us, almost
form us into a piece of you.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “I’m saying that how you ever expected
the kids to lead a life separate from what we do is rainbows and bullshit. They
are our children Mason, they have our genes, our blood, parts of our souls.
They’re gonna follow us however much we block the path that leads them there.”
    I slumped into the chair finally,
needing to support the hurt her disclosure had hit me with. “But I tried, Ava.
I never wanted them to have to… do this shit!”
    “I know.” She smiled, slipping back onto
the chair beside me. She was too far away, my soul needed her. Reaching across,
I dragged her over the gap and settled her on my knee. She rested her head on
my chest when I wrapped my arm around her.
    “Tell me what happened.”
    She sighed and nuzzled further into me.
“Katie rang me in a mess a couple of months ago.” She felt me stiffen but she
carried on. “She’d come home from a party and found a guy strangling and raping
her best friend.”
    “What the hell?”
    She nodded and sighed again. “She lost
it, Mason. Picked up that bloody bookend I’d bought her for Christmas last year
and set to work on him.”
    Vomit surged up my throat and I gagged.
My poor little girl.
    “I calmed her down. Got someone out
there…”
    “Who?” She tensed making me instantly
wary. “Who, Ava. Who did you get to do the clean up?”
    She hesitated, making me close my eyes
to brace myself when I knew her answer before she spoke it. “Steed.”
    We both winced when the sound of my
teeth cracking was loud in the silence.
    “I didn’t know who else to call, Mason.
I knew Greg and Sam would tell you.”
    She lowered her face to the floor when I
pushed her off my knee and stood up. I was trying so hard to control it but it
was racing through me at a speed that I couldn’t stop. My vision swayed when my
fingers cracked into place, one by one, each of them curling and forming fists
as my ribs creaked with the swell of hatred inside me.
    “Mason, please…”
    I spun round and laughed. It was either
that or launch her through the window. “How long have you been talking to him?”
    She shook her head quickly. “I haven’t!”
    “Yet,” I whispered as I grabbed her chin
and made her look at me. “Yet, you chose to phone him instead of telling me and
letting me sort out my own daughter’s problems!”
    “It wasn’t like that!”
    “No?” I scoffed. “Well it fucking looks
like that to me. I told you to delete his number, baby. So care to tell me why…
WHY you rang him?”
    “What the fuck was I supposed to do
Mason?” she screamed, “My baby needed me and I couldn’t get to her. I had to
listen to her screaming and breaking on the bloody phone. She needed