by J Bree
It’s stupid but I can’t say a word about it, because Harley is just as desperate to get rid of Joey and I won’t give them an answer on why I won’t let that happen. Even when it almost tore us all apart, I didn’t say a word.
I don’t want them to know how bad the Manor really is.
It’ll only put them in danger to know.
Avery smirks and my phone buzzes with her input into the group message.
Welcome to the madhouse, Mounty. Now your phone will blow up all day long and you’ll hate me for adding you when they start talking about who has the nicest tits or who fucked which girl first.
I roll my eyes at her and she smirks at me, both of us fully aware that she’s stirring shit up with Harley because even though we might not have talked about it, we both know he’s infatuated with her.
Can’t wait.
I turn my phone onto silent, ready to fall into a fucking shitty sleep with one eye open the whole night and not wanting to be disturbed by Blaise’s drunken rambling all night long.
Avery is busy tapping away, working on something, but when she giggles maniacally, I can’t help but check my phone again.
Seeing as we’re all banned from Annabelle and Harley’s apparently taken a vow of celibacy there will probably be more complaints of blue balls than anything else.
Fucking Morrison.
Of course he’s fucking fallen for her as well.
I knew she’d do this; I knew she’d ruin everything.
The beatings only get worse when Senior gets back from his meeting.
I manage to keep Avery away from him, and I pay off one of the bodyguards to get more coke for Joey so he’s subdued and mostly out of our sights. Either way, I’m counting down the days until we can head back to Hannaford and I can sleep in my own bed.
Avery thrashes around in her sleep too much.
The first night back at Hannaford, I take two of the little prescription pain pills that Avery’s private doctor prescribes me and I sleep like the dead. I wake to my alarm and Blaise’s snoring because he can sleep through fucking anything if he’s hungover enough. Harley is already gone for the day which is both normal and a good thing, because it takes me three tries to get out of bed. I avoid looking at the damage in the mirror until after I’ve showered, as if the water will dull the bruises and I’ll stop looking so fucking battered.
I look as though I’ve been in a car accident.
I’m sure there are many men who would be hospitalized if they were beaten like this but this isn’t even the worst I’ve had before.
The year I went after Joey for choking Avery… Senior almost killed me too.
I don’t like to think about that time.
My phone buzzes as I’m buttoning up my shirt, my chest tight as I force myself not to flinch or wince in pain as I move because it’ll only make things worse.
Breakfast at the dining hall. Stop avoiding us just because Ash is a dick.
I roll my eyes at Harley’s fucking dramatics. He thinks he’s going to change my mind about her, that throwing us together all of the time will make me see that she’s genuine.
It’s fucking stupid.
I drag Blaise down to breakfast with me, mostly so I have someone to roll my eyes with when Harley starts swooning over the Mounty. The girls are both already there when we arrive, and I ignore the Mounty altogether. It’s better that way and when Harley sits down with a shitty look on his face aimed in my direction, I think about getting in the ring with him just to beat it out of him.
I can barely move though, so he’s safe for today.
A freshman kid next to the Mounty bumps her as he takes a seat and she jolts Avery in the process. The Mounty glances down to where she’s bumped Avery and then death stares the freshman, but he’s a cocky little fuck and just offers to let her blow him as an apology.
Harley doesn’t take that very well.
He threatens him with a butter knife and, though it does the job and I still fucking hate the Mounty, I’m not going to let people around here think that it’s okay to disrespect someone even adjacent to my sister.
I lean forward until I can make eye contact with the asshole, watching him gulp as I sneer at him, “You don’t win the sweep for getting your dick sucked anyway, Javier. You’d have to be able to get it up and slip it in, and we all know you have problems with that.”
The kid leaves the table to the sounds of all of us laughing, except the Mounty, who slides straight back into ignoring us all the moment he’s gone and digs into her breakfast.
Blaise refills the Mounty’s glass with a shit-eating smirk and drawls, “Did you like your present, Mounty?”
Avery grins down at her phone. “She hasn’t even opened it, Morrison.”
The smirk falls off of his face. “Why not?”
She sighs and pushes her half-eaten plate away. “I don’t want to have things bought for me.”
Blaise frowns and stares at her like he’s fucking heartbroken.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“It was a thank you, Mounty. Jesus, I wasn’t bribing you.”
She shrugs and takes a bite of her apple, casually fucking with him like she doesn’t notice how rarely he shares anything of himself and just how deeply this might cut him. “Most people say thank you with words. I don’t want your money.”
Avery spots it though and defuses the moment before it can turn into an absolute fucking brawl, flicking a grape at him and saying, “She threw a tantrum at me last week for buying new sheets for her bed because I hated the color of the other ones. She’s as weird about money as Harley is.”
There’s quiet for a moment as we all eat, Blaise groaning over the viciousness of his hangover and the pain in his ego from the Mounty rejecting his little gift.
I’ll have to pry what he got her out of him later.
“Junior or Senior?” the Mounty murmurs, and Harley’s head jerks up to scowl at them.
Avery looks over to Joey so I can’t catch her eye because what the fuck is the Mounty talking about? When she looks back, I finally fucking see the smudge of a bruise on her collarbone, just barely peeking out from her shirt.
Fucking Joey. It had to be him and that means he’d gotten to her sometime after we’d arrived back at school and she hadn’t called me. For fuck’s sake.
“Senior.”
What the fuck?
I didn’t leave them alone together, not fucking once. How did he get to her? How the fuck did he get to her?
I stand abruptly and tug Avery to her feet. “I’ll walk you to class.”
She doesn’t look happy about it, but she tucks her arm in mine and walks out with me.
Senior waited until I was showering and patching myself up in Avery’s room from my last beating to find her and terrorize her.
He’s never laid hands on her like that before.
Every time he’s offered me the choice—me or her—I’ve taken everything he’s had without a single fucking word. He’s broken almost every bone in my body, he’s covered every inch of my skin in cuts and bruises, and not once have I thought about having my sister take the pain for me.
Not even when he beats me day after day, his fists fucking raged on my body, not even then have I broken.
It doesn’t matter.
It never fucking matters because no matter what I do I can’t protect her and he came for her anyway.
I’m fucking livid about it and it’s almost impossible to go about my day afterward without losing my goddamn mind. I don’t even attempt to hide it, either, and the other students don’t just avoid me in the halls like they normally do, they actively turn and run away from me.
It makes things slightly easier.
I don’t go to the dining hall for lunch because if I see Joey, I’ll beat him to death without being able to stop myself so, instead, I head up to my room and down a bourbon.
I might just skip the rest of my classes and get fucking wasted.
Well, I would except Harl
ey arrives soon after I do, and there’s something off about him. My hackles rise immediately, on edge and ready to shed blood at the slightest fucking thing today.
I crave it and I hate myself for that.
My cousin takes a deep breath before letting it out slowly, scrubbing a hand over his face roughly. “I need your keys, the set with the Maserati keys on it. Unless… do you have plans tonight?”
What the fuck is he planning? “My plan is to keep Avery safe from Joey, the same as it always is.”
He nods and then he shifts into his own version of Avery’s power pose, feet shoulder width apart and his hands on his hips. I don’t like it because I know whatever comes out of his mouth isn’t going to be good.
“Lips has something planned for your dad. I don’t know what it is, but she’s heading down to Haven tonight to sort it out. I think—I think she’s going to use her shit to try to keep Avery safe. If you want to know whatever it is then you should drive her. If you won’t then I will, someone has to go with her. That’s how this works—we protect our own.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely isn’t this.
I stare at him for a second and he shrugs. “Say whatever the fuck you want to but the moment she saw those bruises on Floss she fucking went for it, and I don’t need the details to know that she’s throwing something big his way. Look, I get it. I do. Joey has made shit fucking complicated here but I’m asking you to just go with her and see whatever it is firsthand and decide for yourself if she’s as bad as you think. One night. I’ll keep an eye on Avery; Lips is trying to keep her out of it because shit might go bad and she’s protecting her.”
He’s never spoken about anything this… honestly before.
All of us carry our secrets, even as protective and close as we all are. Fuck, it’s because we’re all protective of each other that we don’t. Harley never talks about the ticking time bomb hanging over him thanks to his grandfather, I never talk about what happens in the Manor, and Blaise… Blaise never says how bad shit is back home with the Morrisons when Harley isn’t there to chaperone.
None of us want to admit how close we all are to plummeting off of the edge into the fucking abyss.
And that honesty in Harley is how I find myself leaning against the Maserati when the Mounty appears in the darkness, almost falling over her own feet at the sight of me.
Interesting.
“Harley sent me.”
She huffs at me in frustration and snaps, “You can’t stop me; I have to go. I’ll explain later.”
So Harley obviously didn’t have the same little heart-to-heart with her as he did with me. I unlock the car. “I’ll drive.”
She stares at me like she’s waiting for the punchline and I stare right back at her, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to just trust her.
There’s nothing she can do about Senior… but I want to know who the fuck she’s going to be meeting out here and who the fuck it is that she thinks can go against Senior and survive.
Finally, she sighs and slides into the car, a frown on her face that looks different to the one she wears at school.
It catches my eye.
When we’d gone down to the docks in the slums of Mounts Bay to pick Joey up from her the night before school started, she’d been the same way. There was nothing glaringly obvious that was different about her, but there was this hardness, this fierce blankness to her that hadn’t just shocked me when I’d seen it, it had changed something.
I’m watching her too much.
I’m thinking about her too much.
Even when I was getting the shit kicked out of me by Senior, I only really had two thoughts in my head: protect Avery.
And what is the Mounty girl doing to us all?
Because Avery is a different person now. I was fucking terrified of what that meant at first because she’s been the one true thing in my life, the one person who is unshakably mine, and the idea that anything could hurt her or even come between us is unacceptable to me.
Harley is in love with her.
Blaise is a little too fucking interested, no matter how much he’s fighting to ignore it.
And no matter how hard I fucking try, I can’t stop thinking about her and I’ll hold onto this hate I have for her with everything I have because if I let it go? What do I have then?
Nothing but the fact that she might just love my sister like I do.
I keep my eyes on the road the entire way to Haven, no matter how tempting it is to watch her as she struggles to stay calm.
As the lights of the town come into view, she sighs again and says, “You have to stay in the car. I’m just going to talk to someone about a job. You can’t be seen with me.”
There’s a black Escalade parked up the street with blacked-out windows that couldn’t look more out of place in this little falsely idyllic town, with the bullshit fairy lights and the cookie-cutter boutique stores.
This place used to be called something normal and had the usual stores of a small Cali town, but when Hannaford was built and wealthy privileged students started shopping down here, everything changed until it became a bullshit town that caters to bullshit teenagers spending their trust fund dollars.
The only good thing here is Rita’s bar.
The Mounty’s unwavering stare at the silhouette on the park bench is all the confirmation I need. There’s silence in the car for a second but when she unbuckles her seatbelt, I grab her wrist to stop her.
I might not know who she’s meeting, but no one can take Senior on and survive. His pockets are too deep and there’s too many politicians, feds, and cops in there for anyone to survive him.
“You can’t have my father or my brother killed. Harley seems to think that’s what’s about to happen. You can’t.”
She stares me down with that perfectly blank face, and it pisses me off that she’s not taking this seriously. If only she knew.
But she can’t.
“I’m not ordering a hit,” she says as she wrenches her arm out of my grasp and gets out of the car, pausing for a second before walking up to the bench and sitting down.
It goes against all of my instincts but I stay put.
There are at least three men sitting in the Escalade. I can see just enough movement through the tinted windows to make that assessment, and I have no fucking clue who they are or what weapons they have. I’m assuming the Mounty has that little knife of hers, but I don’t carry.
Mostly because I know if I do, I’ll fucking use it and Joey would be the first to die.
Senior has already made it clear to me what he’ll do if I kill my drug addict brother.
The little meeting lasts ten minutes at most and I spend every last one of them watching everything. Watching the car, watching their backs, watching the three cars that drive past like there isn’t some clandestine meeting happening here in fucking Haven of all places.
It doesn’t matter how hard I look, there’s nothing I can see that’ll tell me what’s happening here. The person she’s meeting is a guy wearing all black, and he’s a lot bigger than her. It’s dark enough that I can only tell that he’s probably got dark hair and that’s about it appearance-wise.
He doesn’t so much as breathe in her direction.
Fuck, he doesn’t even face her for most of the conversation and it’s only toward the end that he moves at all, turning slightly to face her.
I tense as she stands, but she just gives him a curt nod and walks back to the car, slow and steady like this is nothing to her and, fuck, maybe it’s not. Maybe I’ve been sitting here watching her back and expecting the worst and she’s just catching up with an old friend.
Fucking Mounties.
My eyes flick back to her mystery contact but he doesn’t move an inch, just sits there on that bench, even after she slides back into the car and the door gently slams shut.
He’s clearly not going to move until we’re gone.
I start the car to get us out of
there and it’s only then that I notice just how badly she’s shaking. Whatever this was, it was terrifying for her.
She did it for Avery.
It’s that fact that keeps my mouth shut even though there’s a lot I could say right now. I don’t say a fucking thing the whole way back to Hannaford and into the buildings, up the stairs and down the hall; I wait until she’s inside the room she shares with my sister and handing the keys back to me before I finally break.
“Whatever you’ve done, if he finds out—”
She cuts me off. “He won’t. He won’t the same way Harley’s grandfather can’t come after him. I’m not going to explain it, you’ll just have to trust that it’s taken care of.”
There’s this tired look in her eyes that tugs at my chest, even as I push the sensation away.
“Go get some sleep, Ash. Just forget tonight ever happened.” Except there’s no fucking way I can do that.
No way.
Chapter Ten
Blaise
When Harley arrives back to our room and threatens me to get me to distract Avery, I think about arguing with him until Ash gets on board with it and decides he’s going to fuck off to Haven with the Mounty.
I decide it’s worth a night of pain to get him to change his mind about her.
I don’t realize just how fucking jealous I’m going to be over the two of them spending the night together in my Maserati. Fuck, if it were any other girl I’d be betting on him fucking her over the hood because there’s something about cars that just gets him climbing over a piece of ass, but I don’t want to think about that.
It makes me really fucking jealous.
Jealous of him fucking the Mounty, the one we all spent freshman year hating and taunting and throwing every little bit of abuse at because she was below us and, worse, she was a danger to Avery because she caught Joey’s eye.
Now she’s a danger to us because Harley might kill us all if we try fucking anything with her.
So instead of dealing with any of this spiraling fucking bullshit, I do what I do best.