by Helen Scott
But when we found out he’d died, we’d come. And so much had been left unsaid.
“Maybe if we’d screamed at him. If we’d called him every name in the book…”
“I wish I would’ve punched him,” Hyde says, his words soft. “I wish I would’ve shown him what it feels like to have someone more powerful than him beating his flesh raw.”
“Would that have taken away your hurt and anger?” I ask, truly curious.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
I want to ask him more. I want to push for him to forgive Crax. Because the one thing I haven’t told my brothers is that I don’t want our time together to be over when this is done. We don’t need to collect debts like our father, but I think after all my traveling, I’ve realized that Sterling City is our home. Or, more so, wherever my brothers are is my home.
We have a mountain of wealth in our father’s shop. Why couldn’t we sell it? Why couldn’t we pursue our dreams here together?
Because there’s so much left unsaid between us. And I was tired of it. Some things needed to be said. And then… then maybe we could have everything. Maybe even Alexis.
Headlights come down the road behind us. We duck down, and when the lights pass us, we slowly look back up. A black truck pulls into his driveway and the man in question himself steps out. We take a deep breath, exchange a look, and climb out of our car. We’re halfway to him when he looks over at us and goes pale.
The big man himself doesn’t move. In this moment, he isn’t the great hunter that legend has painted him to be. He’s just a man. A man who’s time is up.
We stop when we get to the bottom of the driveway. The Huntsman isn’t someone who will run, but he might be someone who will fight. We stare at him. He’s six feet of muscle with a long dark beard and a plaid shirt and jeans. He still looks like a man in his twenties, even though we all know that’s impossible.
“It’s time,” I say, and it hurts to speak the words out loud.
A second later, the passenger door opens. “I guess you aren’t helping me out?”
I feel like my heart’s in my throat as Snow White herself climbs out of the truck. Snow White, with her paper white skin, her long black hair, and… her massive belly?
Holy shit. She’s pregnant. Snow White is pregnant.
The Huntsman looks between her and us. “You won’t hurt her.”
It’s not a question. It’s a statement. The Huntsman is an old friend. He knows we’re not men who could ever hurt a woman.
She stands fully, seeing us for the first time. Her eyes widen, and she looks between us and her husband. “What’s going on?”
“Dear…”
“Who are you?” she asks, and there’s a note of fear in her voice.
“We’re Rumple’s boys, and I’m sorry to tell you, but your husband made a deal with our father.”
“No.” She presses her knuckles to her mouth and her eyes fill with tears. “That’s how you did it? But you said… you said…”
The Huntsman goes to her and takes her other hand. “It’s okay. I don’t regret a thing.”
She sobs when he kisses her hand. Then he gathers her in his arms as she falls apart. Her entire body shudders as she cries, and my own heart twists. When I’d seen his name on the list, I hadn’t been happy, but I figured he’d made the deal. He knew what he was doing working with my father.
Now though? Now everything makes sense.
At last, the Huntsman releases her. “Go inside. It’ll be done quickly.”
She’s still crying when he walks toward us and stops a few feet away.
Hyde pulls out a knife.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
Hyde’s hand shakes ever-so-slightly. “Rumple gave you the queen’s heart. In exchange, you promised him yours in ten years.”
The Huntsman nods. “And I’m a man who keeps my word.”
I don’t say that he was also a man who had hidden his location behind a dozen spells, because I don’t blame him. If I had the woman of my dreams, and a child on the way, I wouldn’t want to die either.
“Wait!” Suddenly, Snow White stands in front of him.
Hyde takes a step back. He’s not going to kill a pregnant woman, no matter how badly he wants to be done with this.
She spins to the Huntsman. “What exactly did Rumple say?”
“Honey--”
“What did he say?”
The Huntsman releases a shaky breath. “He said a heart for a heart.”
She turns, and there’s defiance in her gaze. “He never said it had to be his heart…”
“I won’t let anyone else die for me!”
“The pig,” she says. “In the backyard.”
The man locks eyes with Hyde. “Is that… is that even possible?”
I hold my breath and try to feel the threads of the deal. Would it be satisfied with a pig heart?
“We can try,” I hear Hyde say gruffly.
The Huntsman and Snow go into their backyard. We hear some grunting and whining and then a squeal that tears through the quiet night. A little while later, Snow White comes back carrying a little basket. Blood leaks out of the bottom and drips as she walks. The Huntsman walks behind her, his arms soaked in blood, his shirt splattered in it.
She gives the basket to her husband. And then, slowly, he hands it to Hyde.
For a minute the weight of the deal still hangs heavily on us, and my stomach twists at the thought of having to take his heart, and then the weight vanishes.
“It’s done,” I say, and find myself smiling.
“It’s done?” The Huntsman starts to sag.
His wife is there to hold him up.
“I can’t believe… I thought I’d never see my son born.”
His wife strokes his beard. “If you ever do something that dumb again, I’m going to poison your food.”
To my surprise, he grins. “Just don’t make it an apple. You know how I hate those.”
They both laugh, and Snow White hugs us both.
We head to our car and they watch us, waving. Hyde puts the basket in the trunk, and then we get in, firing up the engine and tearing down the road.
“You know what the worst thing is?” Hyde’s voice is soft. “Rumple would’ve lied and said it had to be his heart.”
A chill rolls down my spine and my relief at leaving our old friend alive is gone. Hyde is right. Our father may have created a deal with a loophole, but he knew the Huntsman’s pride wouldn’t have allowed him to back out of it, and Rumple wouldn’t point it out. A good man would’ve died for nothing.
“I’m glad he’s dead.”
“That’s something we can agree on,” Hyde whispers, then turns up the radio in an attempt to drown out the memory of our father.
It doesn’t work.
15
Alexis
Crax and I stop at a store and buy cleaning products and new light bulbs before getting to work on Rumple’s sick little shop. At first, the whole damned place feels like the storage shed of some mass murderer. But after putting in more lights and brightening the dreary space, and cleaning off the layers of dirt, the place isn’t nearly as bad.
And then there’s Crax. Every time I look at him, I can’t help but smile. He took off that suit of his and put on a white shirt and basketball shorts. He has a bucket full of soapy water and a rag that he’s been using to clean off the filthy surfaces. It shouldn’t be cute, but it freaking is. Has there ever been anything sexier than a hot man cleaning?
Lordy, I don’t think so. My lady bits are enjoying every bit of watching him clean.
He looks at me. “How’s the inventorying going?”
I jerk, looking back down at the clipboard and paper. He put me in charge of inventorying everything in the store, and even though I’d written a ton down, I’d barely made a dent in the surface of the place. “Okay, I guess.”
“Then why do you keep grinning?”
I hate that I feel my cheeks he
at. Had he really noticed? Then he must have noticed me checking him out. “You’re more observant than you seem.”
He smiles. “Yeah, that was one good thing Rumple taught me.”
For some reason, I find myself curious about what life was like with the man who had bought an unborn child. “How did he teach you to be observant?”
His humor fades. “As a boy, he’d have me watch people. He wanted me to find people who seemed sad, more than sad, desperate, and then he’d see if he could make a deal with them. If I chose right, we got ice cream. If I chose wrong, we went to bed with no dinner. I learned pretty fast.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “I know I’m not supposed to feel bad for my captors, but I kind of think being sold to you guys might be better than being his kids.”
He lifts a brow. “Don’t kind of think it, know it. Rumple was a worse father than a debt collector, and that’s saying something.”
I laugh, and he smiles, going back to cleaning.
“So, what’s up with Hyde and you?” Now, I know I’m being nosy, but I can’t help it. “There seems to be a lot of anger there. He’s actually kind of a jerk.”
Crax pauses in his cleaning, before continuing again, his movements faster. “It’s not his fault. It’s mine. Hyde deserves to be mad at me. Hell, he deserves to hate me.”
“You? Come on… I mean, you’re not exactly unlikable.”
I thought he would laugh, but instead he just keeps scrubbing the gunk and dust from the shelf like it did him wrong in another life. “I’m not a good guy,” Crax finally says.
“I doubt that.”
He finally stops cleaning, dunking the rag back into the bucket and cleaning it carefully. “I had a choice, and I made the wrong one. I thought I could get a good job and support my brothers, get them out of that situation. But as soon as I made enough to support them, badly, but to get them out of there, they were already gone. And they hated me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with getting yourself out of a bad situation,” I tell him, and mean it.
He rings the rag out. “Just… trust me… I deserve whatever he throws at me.”
I open my mouth to say more, but a little bell jingles over the door. We look up to find Hyde storming in and Zard coming slowly after, carrying eight boxes of pizza. Instantly, I sense Crax tense. Hyde’s anger and Crax’s self-loathing seems to fill the air until I can’t take it.
“Yay, pizza! But did you get some for yourselves too?”
Zard grins. “We kind of thought we compensated for your ridiculous appetite.”
“Depends what kind you got…”
“Meat lovers.”
“Eight fucking boxes of the same thing?” I leap off of the countertop and set down the inventory list, ready to fight them.
“Well, and some pepperoni and cheese.”
I glare at Zard. “The good pepperoni?”
His grin widens. “Yeah, but that’s for me.”
I advance on him. “I’ll fight you for it.”
“I think I’d like that,” he tells me, giving me a wink.
Hyde speaks from behind me. “Should a prisoner even get pizza? Don’t we have crackers or anything?”
“Ass,” I mutter, but we all head upstairs.
Zard speaks from behind me. “Speaking of asses…”
I look back at him, and see him staring blatantly at my ass. “Enjoying the view?”
“Mm. Mm,” he says, then winks at me.
I look forward, catching myself before I stumble up the stairs.
Behind me, his rich laugh comes, vibrating through my very soul. And as much as I want to get all stabby with him for threatening my food, I can’t help but soak in the sound. Traveling constantly has been fun in some ways. I never see the same place twice. I never get bored of my surroundings. But at the same time, it’s pretty hard to make friends.
Here, in this house with them, I can almost imagine what it’d feel like to have real friends or a real family. And I kind of like it.
When we reach the apartment, Zard sets the pizza on the counter. Next to it, Hyde puts a basket. I frown as I stare at the white countertop. “What's dripping from the basket?”
“Blood,” Hyde says.
“Blood?”
“Actually, a heart.” He’s looking at me, his eyes piercing, as if he’s evaluating my response.
“Whose heart?”
For a second I can’t tear my eyes from his. This whole time I’ve managed to convince myself that by working with them I’m just shortening my sentence, that I’m gaining my freedom. But in this moment, it kind of feels like I traded my life for my soul.
And it feels wrong.
“Whose heart?” I ask again.
Hyde grins. “An innocent, princess.”
16
Hyde
Watching Alexis's fury build as I spoke was a turn on, I couldn't deny that. I knew Crax and Zard were both giving her puppy dog eyes whenever she wasn't looking though, so I wasn't about to feed her ego. She had them by the short and curlies, if only she realized. That shit was not going to fly with me.
"You killed an innocent person as part of a deal?" she asks incredulously, her anger staining her cheeks a lovely shade of red as her chest starts to heave, either from her anger, as I suspect, or from fear of me and my lack of limits. I push the idea that she’s scared of me away, focusing instead on another set of cheeks I wanted to redden with the palm of my hand, but that’s getting ahead of myself.
"It was a pig, and neither of us killed it," Zard says, ruining my fun.
She deflates a little. "A pig?"
I nod.
"You really are an asshole, you know that?" she spits the words at me as though they’re weapons.
"Princess, you have no idea." I chuckle and load a plate up with some slices of pizza. When I look up, her eyes are wide as she stares at the mountain of cheesy goodness on my plate. I can't help it; I lean in close as I whisper, "My appetite for food isn't the only thing that's insatiable."
As I move away I see her cheeks pinken once again, but this time I know it's not anger. It's lust. Fuck, my cock rages to life at the thought of having her at my mercy. Whenever I'd said it before it was always some kind of torture I'd planned on, nothing hardcore, just enough to make her not want to risk running again.
Now?
I’m the one being tortured by the tight tank top and booty shorts she’s wearing. Her legs look long and lean and like they should be wrapped around my waist or my head, and her perky breasts are a little more than a handful, which is perfect. Something to grab on to while I fuck her brains out.
Ugh. I shove half a slice of pizza in my mouth. Where has my anger and rage gone? This girl had made us chase her and now she’s here, living in our family apartment, eating our food, using our stuff, and what did we have to show for it? What the hell had Rumple been thinking, making a deal for a human life? In all reality, he'd probably just been trying to go after the thing that would hurt her mom the most when she made the deal. What he didn't realize was that her mom didn't give two shits about her, and now we are the ones stuck with a person who depends on us.
I can't stop myself from glancing at her occasionally while she eats her pizza and watches some random TV show that Zard apparently finds hilarious with us. She smiles every once in a while, but when I actually watch, her eyes are on my younger brother, not the TV. She is just as soft for him as he is hard for her. And I know we’re all struggling with our attraction to her.
We’re all fucked.
Some part of me wonders if Rumple knew this would happen. Had he been able to foresee that we would need her? That she would tame each of us in ways I hadn't predicted? I knew his magic was more than ours, in so many ways, but had foresight been one of those closely guarded skills that made him so mysterious, even to his sons?
I push the thought away, something I seem to be doing a lot recently, but I hate thinking about that monster and he's been on my mind more than ever
since we brought Alexis home. I tried refusing to think of this place as our home, but it wasn't worth it. This was where we had grown up. Sterling City. This store. All of it was home. It had taken Alexis's arrival for me to realize that. Now I just have to accept it.
When Alexis excuses herself and goes to bed for the night I realize how long the four of us have been sitting there, just being with each other. I'd been too lost in my own thoughts to pay attention to time. Now that she’s out of the room I feel like I can take a deeper breath, as though when she'd been in here with us she’d taken up more than her share of oxygen.
I know it's just my idiot self letting her get to me though.
"She's going to destroy us if we're not careful," Crax says as he takes a swig from a bottle of beer that I hadn't even noticed him get.
I am off my game to say the least, so I just mumble my agreement. My mind slips back to the talk Zard had with me in the car as I look at my older brother. I had idolized him as a kid, wanted what he had, and when he left I was happy at first since I thought it would mean that I got more of our father's attention, and I was right, just not in the way I wanted.
A shudder rippled through me at the memory of my first beating. It was the day after Crax had called to say he wasn't coming home, that he was going to be a college student. At first Rumple had been calm, seemed to accept the news with grace. Little did I know the storm was brewing inside him. The rain of fists and slaps and kicks came later.
He apologized to me after the first time. I think seeing the bruises and cuts on his son's face had surprised him. It happened again though, and again and again, until I lost track of how often he unleashed his anger on me. He learned to only mark me where my clothes would hide it and moved on from using his hands and feet to using his belt or whatever was within easy reach.
Just the thought of Alexis seeing some of the scars covering my body made me want to walk out of the room and never come back. I don't though. Instead, I say, "I'm sorry."
Crax and Zard both turn to look at me.
"What?" Crax asks while Zard nods me on, clearly knowing where I'm going before I do.