“Well, at least stay the night tonight,” Mark said as he cleared his throat. “It’s getting late and I can see how tired all four of you are. There are extra beds and a pull-out sofa. You can eat your fill of whatever you can find, and in the morning, I’ll brew a fresh pot of coffee before you leave to head back toward Charlotte.”
I was tired, and sore, and hungry, so Mark’s invitation sounded like the perfect idea to me. We could all get a solid night of sleep here, put some food in our bellies, and then head back in the morning feeling as if we were revived and ready to take on whatever lies ahead.
Even though there were several beds in my uncle’s house, which I thought was strange for a single man who lives alone, the four of us chose the guestroom with the biggest bed and all curled up together on it. I didn’t care that Adam’s knee was in my side or that my elbow was smooshed up against Michael’s chest. I just didn’t want to be apart from any of them tonight.
“You sure about this?”Michael asked as his voice quietly cut through the small space between our faces while the other guys slept.
I missed this—the late night talks that Michael and I would have, since neither of us could ever seem to calm our minds down enough to fall asleep.
“No,” I said with a whisper. “But I’ve never really been sure about anything, to be honest.”
He nodded. “That’s fair.”
“But is it really fair for me to drag all three of you along with me into this mess again?” I asked while I played through my thoughts out loud.
I knew that I didn’t want to be separated from them again, but I also knew that what I was asking of them was a lot.
But Michael hit me back with that harsh, yet wonderful, wisdom of his. “Things aren’t ever fair in life. You and I know that better than almost anyone. The best any of us can do, is to just do our best.”
I laughed a little under my breath. “That’s pretty deep,” I teased.
“Yeah well, every once in a while I say something meaningful,” he said as he stifled his chuckle. “The most meaningful thing that I ever said, was that I love you.”
I leaned my head toward him and felt his lips meet with mine. There was a deep feeling of comfort knowing that no matter what kind of trouble I found myself in, or what bad decisions I might make, Michael was always going to be there to back me up and save my ass if needed. And I would always do the same for him. I mean, I loved Adam and Rob too, but not like this.
Not with the intensity that I could feel Michael inside of my bones.
When our mouths pulled slowly apart, I tilted my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I knew that I still wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I wanted to quiet my mind and think. I thought about Julian for a moment, and the days that the four of us had had when Julian was still alive. Then I thought about the time that Julian and I had before any of this had happened; before I had met Michael and Rob, before my mother had been killed, and before I knew that any part of this violent world existed.
I wondered for a few minutes what Julian would do.
I wondered if he would tell me to take the money and get the hell out of here while we still had the chance to, or if he would tell me to go back into the lion’s den and try one last time to honor the life of the woman who mothered us both, even if it might prove to be a completely awful idea. Deep down, I knew what Julian would say.
He would tell me to follow my heart.
The problem that I always had with that advice, was that sometimes my heart led me in more than one direction. Sometimes my heart felt more like a whole network of veins that branched out into a million different directions, each wanting its own thing and heading on its own path. That made it difficult to follow my heart without being torn apart in the process.
I pressed my eyes closed tighter as I heard Michael’s breathing change and knew that exhaustion had finally gotten the better of him. I needed rest, too, but my brain wouldn’t let me.
If only there was some sort of way to know that I was doing the right thing.
Pick a path.
The thought popped in my head randomly.
Just pick a path and do it.
His voice was so clear-cut in my head that I couldn’t have denied it if I wanted to.
“Thanks Julian,” I whispered.
Then, I slipped off into a fitful slumber, hoping to wake up to a better day that, for once, didn’t spell ‘disaster’ for all of us.
In my dream, everyone was there—everyone.
We were all sitting around a giant round table: me, Michael, Adam, Rob, and even Julian. My mother was there, and so was my father and David. Even my Uncle Mark and Aunt Naomi were there. Everyone was sitting around a large, circular, wooden table that was so wide that it seemed to stretch for miles between us.
And no one was talking.
It looked like everyone was just waiting for something to say. But then I thought of something to say and opened my mouth to speak. As soon as I did, it was as if someone had flipped a switch or pulled a lever, because suddenly everyone started talking at once. All ten people at the table, including myself, began a rambling discourse right over the top of each other. I couldn’t hear what anyone was actually saying, not even myself. All I could hear was noise; the sound of urgent and aggravated voices that didn’t even seem to be taking breaths between words.
I tried to shout over the top of all of them, to tell them to be quiet and take turns so that I could hear what they were saying. But no one listened.
If the voices had been visible, they would have looked like a mass of tangled knots being hurled back and forth across the table. The louder that I became, the more that all the others raised their voices as well. Until finally, I just gave up and went silent.
And as soon as I fell silent, so did all of the others.
I looked at each one of them in turn, aware that I was inside of a dream and trying to figure out what the message was that was being relayed. Was I supposed to be listening to everyone? Was I supposed to stay quiet? Whatever this dream was supposed to be telling me, it was only confusing me more. I turned to Michael who was sitting right next to me at the table. When I opened my mouth to get ready to ask him something, everyone at the table opened their mouths as well. I looked around without speaking at everyone’s hanging jaws, and the moment that the first sound started to come from my throat, it started in theirs too. So, I closed my mouth to be silent again.
I didn’t want to get wrapped back up in that verbal knot anymore.
I heard a tapping sound and looked back over at Michael whose finger was hitting against the top of the table, right next to a few words that looked as if they had been scratched into the wood. Words that had already been echoed to me by my best friend, my confidante, and a man I missed more than my own mother some days.
“Listen only to yourself.”
And when I looked back up into Michael’s eyes, I smiled.
With all of them smiling at me in return.
5
In the middle of the night, my few moments of restless sleep were interrupted by a crashing sound that shattered the silence in the bedroom and left a reverberating echo inside my skull. All four of us sat straight up in the bed and my heart was pounding furiously from waking up so quickly from a deep sleep.
“What is it?” I asked in a whisper as the noise continued and the sound became a clearer indication of a scuffle or commotion.
Adam was the first to the door, with Michael right behind him, with Rob standing near me as we followed them outside of the bedroom carefully and quietly.
“I told you to stay out of this,” Naomi’s voice screamed from inside of my uncle’s bedroom.
As soon as I heard her voice, I froze. Rob grabbed me by the hand to make sure that I stayed still and stayed quiet as Adam and Michael crept closer down the hall toward Mark’s bedroom.
Then, we all heard Mark’s voice. “That money doesn’t belong to you, Naomi. It was Paula’s and she wanted her dau
ghter to have it. You and Paula were so close; why would you want to go against your sister’s dying wish? What do you even need all that money for? I’ll take care of you, if you want. I’ll make sure that you have everything that you need and that you never need to worry about money. You don’t need to keep trying to steal from Lisette.”
“I don’t want your money,” she snarled at him. “I don’t want any money touched by a man’s hands.”
He snickered. “I’m not just a man, Naomi. I’m your brother. Whatever disillusioned notions you have about men don’t apply to me. We’re family.”
“Now see,” Naomi’s voice said as it turned several shades darker and more manic. “That’s just like a man to assume that the woman is the disillusioned one. Maybe you’re the one who is disillusioned. Maybe you should have realized that you needed to stand down and stay out of my way. Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand what’s really going on, Mark.”
She bit through his name almost as if she wanted to bite his head off with her own teeth.
“Then tell me,” he said with audible frustration. “Tell me what it is that you think is going on.”
She hissed her next words. “I’m getting the money that should have been mine,” she said. “Because I will put it to better use than either you or Lisette would. She’ll let the men who follow her like puppies influence her judgement. She might even let you influence her judgement. I won’t make the same mistake, though. I’m here for the money, Mark. That’s what’s going on.”
The next sound that I heard was the sickening sound of me being mistaken about everything; mistaken about having come here, about letting my uncle try to help me, and about what Naomi was truly capable of. The sound of the gunshot was so fast that I didn’t even have time to react, but the sound of Mark’s groan lasted much longer.
Michael, Adam, and Rob immediately ran into my uncle’s bedroom, leaving me standing in the hallway alone trying to decide whether I should run after them or stay here so that I didn’t do anything else stupid to put them in harm’s way.
After a split-second decision, I ran into the room behind them.
The scene that played out before me was nothing short of everything that I had tried to avoid with my attempt to come here alone. But I couldn’t have been more grateful that the guys were all here with me. My uncle’s body was draped over the floor as a pool of blood crawled along the ground around him as if it were a red shadow. Michael, Adam, and Rob were all wrestling with Naomi until they were able to wrangle the gun from her hand and restrain her. She didn’t know we were here. She wasn’t expecting the three of them to rush her. She looked frantic and confused as her head whipped around to look at each of them. Michael stuck the handgun in his back pocket while Adam and Rob held onto Naomi, who was trying to scream, and bite, and kick her way out of their grasp.
Unfortunately for her, they were a lot stronger than she was and there was no way that she was getting free from their hold or hurting anyone else.
I ran to kneel down beside my uncle and lifted his head into my lap as Michael put pressure on his wound. But the bullet had hit the left side of his chest, and by the amount of blood that was seeping from his body, it was obvious that Naomi had struck his heart.
Her aim couldn’t have been more perfect for a fatal shot.
“Mark,” I said as tears welled in my eyes for someone that I barely knew. “You gotta hang on for me, okay?”
I cried because I was so tired of losing people, even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to know my uncle yet. I still wanted to, and those decisions were being ripped away from me by selfish people who had nothing better to do than profit off the backs of others. I was so sick of people taking the things that were mine and hurting the people that I cared about.
I looked at his pained face and heard him struggling to breathe as his eyes became wider and more full of fear. I glanced at Michael and I could tell by his expression that there was nothing we could do. Within the next minute or two, my uncle would be dead.
But Mark still reached up and grabbed my hand. “Lisette,” he strained, “Follow Paula’s wishes. Do what your mother wanted to see done. She gave her life in order to protect you and everyone that needed protection. Honor her.”
The last two words he spewed out were laced with blood that dripped down his chin. As soon as he had pushed himself to relay his last thought in this world, Mark died. Right there in my lap as I held his head against my thigh, he died.
And it was all Naomi’s fault.
“We should just kill her,” Rob said. “We should kill her right now and be done with this. She deserves to be killed, and then we would be free of her.”
For a minute, I agreed with Rob. I hated Naomi. She killed my uncle, she nearly killed the man I love more than anyone in the world, and she tormented the other men that I care about. She wants to steal my mother’s dying wish so that I cannot fulfill it, and I hate her for all of it. But Mark’s words rang in my head so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything aside from what he said.
Honor her.
He gave his life for this too. He protected my mother’s inheritance, and her journal, all this time just to make sure that I received the chance to choose what to do with my mother’s wish. As much as I agreed with Rob and wanted to pull that gun out of Michael’s back pocket and shoot her squarely between the eyes, I couldn’t.
The only thing that was going to make this right was if I could make sure that all of this loss was not in vain.
“No,” I said to Rob in a voice that sounded much stronger than I felt. “We can’t kill her. We’re going to help her.”
I had to grit my teeth in order to make the words come out without choking on them as I set my uncle’s lifeless body down onto the ground and stood up.
“Help?” Adam asked. “Lisette, come on. I know you want to do the right thing, but you can’t be serious about this. She’s killed people.”
“We were able to help David,” I reminded him. “David killed people too. Hell, we’ve killed people ourselves.”
“Yeah, but we’re not psychotic,” Adam said, half sarcastically and half completely serious. “Not yet anyway.”
“What are we going to do with her, Lisette?” Michael asked as he closed Mark’s eyelids with a gentle stroke of his hand. He knew better than to argue with me right now. “It’s not like we can just throw her in the backseat of the car and take her back to Charlotte. She’s dangerous.”
“Why not?” I asked. “There’s four of us and only one of her. She has no weapons, no one here to help her, no traps that she’s been able to set. I don’t see any reason why we can’t put her in the back of the car and take her home.”
“Home?” Rob asked.
I nodded. “I’m going to create a sanctuary for anyone who is troubled, like my aunt. I’m going to build it in Charlotte.”
“You mean we’ll build it together,” Michael reminded me.
I nodded once more before I continued. “We’ll build it, get it off the ground, hire people to run it, and then once it is self-sufficient enough to take care of the residents there, then we can leave and go back to Asheville or wherever else it is that we all want to go. My mother’s wish is to have it built and help people inside of it, including Naomi. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Michael teased me a bit. “If I have to keep correcting you to say ‘we’, I’m going to start feeling offended.”
“Sorry,” I said with a soft smile. “That is what we’re going to do.”
“Alright,” Adam sighed as he shrugged his shoulders, knowing he wasn’t going to get any further toward dissuading me in this argument. “Let’s bind her up at least. She’s a crazy bat.”
Naomi spit on his shirt, and Adam looked at me with his hands lifted in the air as if to say “See, told you so”.
Michael took care of my uncle’s body while I gathered up all of the inheritance documents and my mother’s journal. Rob held Naomi still as Adam wrapped a c
ord around her wrists and ankles. I could tell that the cord was painfully tight by the way she was screaming and cursing at them.
Good.
I hoped it hurt her.
Just because I was going to follow my mother’s wishes didn’t mean that I was going to make this an easy experience for Naomi, not after everything that she had done to hurt me and the people that I cared about.
“When I get out of these bindings, I will make sure you pay for what you’re doing!” Naomi screamed at the guys.
“Sounds to me like that makes it a good idea to never untie you then,” Rob sneered.
Adam chuckled and Naomi lurched forward and tried to bite him. He was right; she was a crazy bat. I walked up to her, not close enough for her to spit on me or bite me, but close enough that she could hear me and see the look in my eyes.
“Naomi,” I said. “I’m going to try to help you because that is what my mother wanted me to do. But I’m not going to put up with any more of your violent, selfish bullshit. If we need to keep you tied up with cords so that you don’t try to kill us, then we will. If we need to knock you out in order to get you to be quiet, then we’ll do that, too.”
She laughed at me as her eyes flared with rage. “You couldn’t knock out anything,” she said with a cruel smile on her face.
I took a step closer to her, cocked my arm back, and punched her in the face so hard that I felt the tiny bones in my knuckles crack. Naomi’s head slumped forward and her body went limp in Rob’s arms.
“Damn,” Rob laughed. “That was quite a punch.”
“I’m really glad she finally shut up,” Adam said. “I wanted to punch her myself, but I thought you would have gotten mad.”
“I would have,” I said as I cradled my hand. “I wanted to be the one to do it.”
Rob threw Naomi over his shoulder and Adam held the door open as the two of them went out to put her in the car.
“How’s your hand?” Michael asked as he reached for me and carefully tried to unfold my fingers which were still clenched into a fist.
Vicious: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 3) Page 4