Skeletons of Us (Unquiet Mind Book 2)

by Anne Malcom

  It didn’t mean I had to like it.

  *****

  “I can’t believe he gets beaten up for money,” I said, pacing a room that smelled of stale sweat and rust.

  Sam sipped his beer. “Well, he doesn’t exactly get beaten up. He beats people up.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Sam raised his brow. “Big fuckin’ difference. He does it fuckin’ well from what I hear.”

  I glared at him. “You knew about this?”

  He held his hands up in surrender. “Everybody knows. He was kind of famous… or infamous.”

  I glanced around the room. “Everybody?” I accused.

  Wyatt looked sheepish. Noah met my stare. “We didn’t tell you before ‘cause we knew the mere mention of his name hurt you. Now, we reckoned it wasn’t our place to tell you.”

  I huffed. “This is ridiculous.”

  Noah stepped forward. “That’s what he is now, babe. He’s not the same man we knew in high school. Knew that the moment I saw him in that hospital room. He’s different now. Losing you, it took him to a dark place.”

  I looked at him. “He didn’t lose me. He let me go. It was his choice.”

  Noah eyed me. “Was it?” he asked quietly. “He loved you more than anything. Anyone with two eyes could see that back then. He would have given you anything. Lettin’ you go, he gave you the world.”

  I blinked through my tears. “I didn’t want the world. I wanted him,” I choked out.

  Noah squeezed my hand. “He had a mom who did a good job of convincing him he was nothin’, that he wasn’t good enough. He wanted the best for you. Not saying it was right, what he did to you, but it’s what he thought was right.” He paused. “A dirty gym isn’t exactly the right place to be talking about all this, but you need to know that before you see this.” He nodded his head to the door where we could hear the dull rumble of the crowd.

  We had driven to an abandoned gym on the outskirts of Hope. Pretty much the entire club rode out. I had been on the back of Killian’s bike, with him regularly squeezing my thigh as if he could sense my nerves.

  When we had gotten to the gym, the parking lot was already half full and Killian had directed me to a back entrance.

  “People in here aren’t exactly expectin’ rock stars to be turnin’ up to something like this,” he had said. “But it doesn’t mean you don’t stand out. You can wait in here until it gets a little more crowded. Then Cade and Gage have got you.”

  He had given me a firm, long kiss before disappearing with Lucky to “prepare,” whatever that meant.

  The door Noah had just pointed at opened and Cade took up the entire frame. Even though years had passed and there was a couple more lines in the corner of his eyes, he was still hot as anything.

  “You ready?” he asked, his eyes settling on me.

  No.

  I nodded. Noah grasped my hand and took us out the door. Cade walked us down a small hallway.

  “Remember, we’ve got you. This shit might be a bit chaotic, but we won’t let shit happen to you. Killian would kill me, for one.” The corner of Cade’s mouth turned up. “Second, no one messes with the Sons of Templar.”

  Without further ado, he took us into a cavernous room that obviously used to be an open-air gym. Instead of equipment, it was crowded with bodies circled around a ring in the middle.

  Noah squeezed my hand. Sam stepped from behind me to carefully put the hood of Killian’s sweatshirt on my head.

  “Don’t want anyone papping the rock world’s golden girl at an underground fight,” he murmured in my ear. “You’d totally topple me off my perch as the badass of the rock world. Then I’d have to disown you.” His tone was light, but when I glanced to him, his jaw was hard.

  Cade took us to a slightly removed area from the masses, crowded with people in leather cuts, all muscled and attractive and all-around badasses. They grinned at me when I approached.

  “Ready to watch your old man kick some ass?” Gage asked, grinning at me like a kid on Christmas.

  I swallowed. “Sure.”

  The air of the crowd changed and they started roaring. I turned to see the source of the chaos. Killian was making his was across the room; the throngs separated for him. Lucky was at his side, Brock at the front. When Killian climbed up into the ring, his gaze flickered through the crowd until ice blue eyes landed on me.

  For a split second, the roar went away, as did everyone around me. It was just me and Killian.

  Then it came back, even louder than ever when he turned his attention to the center of the stage and to the other man in it.

  Killian was big now. His muscles rippled and glistened. He was only wearing cutoff sweats, his broad and inked chest on display. The chest that had my name on it.

  People started to scream when a man went to the middle of the ring, murmured something to each of the men, then threw his hands down.

  That was it. The signal.

  I recognized the energy in the room. The feeling of the crowd. It was similar to what happened at our shows. But this was different, feral almost. These people weren’t here for a show. They were here for blood. And Killian was here to give it to them.

  The air was pulsating with an energy that Killian usually fed off. The stale smell of sweat of the gym was replaced by the thirsty scent of bloodlust.

  That energy used to seep into his bones and silence the demons that he had lived with for four years. But stepping into that ring, there was no silence. The roar of the crowd threatened to deafen him and the emptiness he used to embrace in the ring was out of his grasp.

  He didn’t take note of the man across from him, nor his brothers at his back. The crowd didn’t exist except to fill up his mind with their fuckin’ chatter.

  No, the only thing that existed was her.

  He sought her out immediately as he stepped into the ring. He’d never been nervous before a fight; he’d never been anything. Not angry, not happy, not excited. That was why he did it. Because the fight, the blood, it took him away from himself and he was able to shake the demons of the past, if only for the time it took to fuck up any idiot stupid enough to get in the ring with him.

  Those fights, the whole fuckin’ goal of them was to get rid of her face from his mind.

  This time, he thought he might just go crazy if he didn’t lay eyes on her. When he did, he got what he craved. Emptiness. Not emptiness of his soul, that shit was full to the brim with Lexie.

  But his mind quieted and the roar of the crowd petered off.

  He saw it in her eyes then, the fear, the uneasiness, the panic, and acid burned through his veins. He almost jumped out of the ring and called the whole fight off.

  He didn’t.

  As much as he loathed the thought of him being the reason for Lexie having that shit dancing in her eyes, this had to be done.

  So, with extreme effort, he tore his gaze from her and focused on the man in front of him.

  He was big, not that that mattered.

  Killian was bigger.

  The referee stepped forward, though it was a stretch to call him that. This shit was unregulated and definitely not fuckin’ legal; that was the point. Stryker, the man standing between Killian and his opponent, was the one who made most of the coin off this shit and liked to be front and center.

  Killian stepped forward at his gesture, as did the man who Killian was going to fuck up.

  “Now, I don’t want a clean fight. Have it dirty as you fuckin’ like,” Stryker said, gaze flickering between them. “Just do your best not to die, can’t be fucked with the admin of that shit.”

  On that, he stepped back and the fight began.

  Killian waited for the emptiness to kick in, for his mind to turn cold and focused on one thing.

  Blood.

  As he circled the man in the ring, that didn’t happen. One thing stayed in his mind. Took it over.

  Lexie.

&nb
sp; Pain exploded in his eye as his distraction cost him the first punch of the night. He shook it off, trying not to think about his beautiful, delicate girl in a room of people who got off on violence.

  On pain.

  He narrowed his eyes and darted forward, landing one swift punch, front and center.

  He didn’t feel a thing as he heard the crack of bone. Instead, he advanced again, landing a second punch to his opponent’s ribs.

  It was a mistake bringing Lexie here. He knew that now. Totally fucked up. She needed to see this part of him, what he’d become, but he could have thought of better ways than subjecting her fragile soul to this.

  His head rattled and warm blood trickled down his cheek as his opponent’s fist opened up the flesh on his face.

  Killian didn’t feel it.

  The only thing he felt was impatience.

  He needed to get this fuckin’ shit over with so he could get Lexie out of here and leave the demons of his past behind.

  In quick succession, he landed four viscous punches, the large body of the man in front of him jerking with the impact.

  All of this, this need for blood, to feel something other than his own pain, to inflict pain on someone else, was fucked. It registered now. As did the realization that he didn’t need it anymore.

  Not when he had her.

  His last punch sent his opponent to the floor, knocking him out.

  It would be the last time he ever stepped into the ring searching for escape.

  He didn’t need to escape when he’d found his sanctuary.

  My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. No matter how hard I tried, they kept quivering. Same with my heart. It rattled against my ribcage. The fight had ended quickly.

  Not quick enough.

  As soon as it was over, Killian stood up from his opponent’s prone body, not paying attention to the crowd screaming his name, nor Lucky and Brock coming into the ring. He only had eyes for me.

  And my horrified eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from him. He flinched the moment his gaze found me. Actually flinched. The few hits that his opponent had landed hadn’t gotten any kind of reaction, but meeting my eyes, Killian flinched.

  He launched himself over the ropes and pushed through the people that swarmed him the moment he did so, swatting them away like flies. He made it to me and still I didn’t move, didn’t say anything. Neither did he. His hand circled around mine and he dragged me through the crowd. My hood was still up so no one could actually see me, not that they were focused on me. Killian was the one. If it would have been any other situation, I would have laughed at this, being in a crowd that didn’t even blink at me, didn’t know who I was. I would have loved it.

  But not now.

  The sounds of the crowd died off as Killian took us down a familiar hallway and into the room that stank of sweat and was littered with decaying equipment. The door slammed behind him and I kept walking into the room, releasing his hand from mine.

  Taking a deep breath, I turned, facing Killian, who hadn’t moved from the doorway.

  I stood across the room from him. Blood trickled from a cut in his cheek and his left eye was slowly swelling, but it wasn’t that I was focused on, though the injuries marring his handsome face hit me somewhere deep. No, it was his knuckles. They were red and swollen.

  All I could hear was the thud of flesh against flesh, even in this silent room. Even though it was just me and Killian here, the quiet didn’t come. That sound was on replay in my mind.

  He stepped forward purposefully, but froze when I, on instinct, scuttled back.

  His face turned hard. “Lexie,” he began, voice soft.

  I met his gaze. “Y-you do that often?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

  He scrutinized my face before nodding once.

  My fists clenched at my sides.

  “The violence. It got to you,” he surmised in a flat voice.

  “No,” I paused. “I mean yes, but that’s not what it was. Not all of it. That other guy, the one that you knocked out, he was so angry.”

  “Yeah, babe, on account of me knockin’ him out,” Killian responded dryly.

  “But you, you weren’t. Your face, there was nothing. It was empty, like there was nothing in there, like you weren’t in there.” I shuddered at the memory of that robotic face inflicting that much violence.

  Killian surged forward, this time ignoring the way I stiffened at his approach. The hands that had been so violent cupped my face with tenderness that a child might use when cradling a baby bird. “I’m not empty, freckles,” he rasped. “You know that. Of everyone, you fuckin’ know that. ‘Cause I’m full to the brim with you.”

  Tears prickled the corners of my eyes. “I thought the hardest thing would be getting over the years between us, forgiving you for breaking my heart,” I whispered. “But turns out the forgiveness was easy. Nothing really, once I knew why. I never thought about the years that lay between us. The ones that molded us into different people. I never thought we might not fit anymore,” I choked out.

  Killian’s eyes darkened and his grip tightened. “We fit, baby. Fuck, if I don’t fit with you, there’s nowhere in the world where I belong.”

  I looked at him. “That’s what I think too, Killian. Or at least, that’s what I thought.”

  His face hardened. “What are you saying, Lexie?”

  I gazed at him, at the face that I’d seen in both my dreams and nightmares for years. The face I loved more than anything. The face of the man who knew me better than anyone else. The face of a stranger.

  This time he wasn’t content to wait in silence for me to figure out the noise in my head. He squeezed me, almost to the point of pain. “Lexie,” he bit out.

  “This, us, it’s too hard. There’s too much pain to wade through.”

  You dream of being reunited with your long lost love and that dream doesn’t contain doubt, or darkness of complications. In that dream, you rode off into the sunset and lived an easier life than the one you’d had before. This wasn’t easier.

  But it was more. More than I ever imagined.

  Killian’s jaw hardened. “Of course it’s fuckin’ hard, freckles. Love, real love, it’s not meant to be easy. It’s not something plucked from the pages of a book. It’s a struggle. It’s pain. Because nothing ever worth havin’ is easy to get. It’s hard because we are so fuckin’ deep in each other that it actually hurts your mind to contemplate the reality of that. What it means.” He stepped forward and his hand cupped my jaw. “How it means forever.”

  Every one of his words were physical, hitting me and creating exquisite pain as they impacted. His gaze dripped with so much intensity that I almost forgot how empty it had been moments before, in that ring.

  Almost.

  Blood dripped from the hand that was cupping my chin, creating droplets on the floor. My gaze left the captivity of his ice blue eyes and focused on that.

  It wasn’t the blood or the violence of the fight that gave me pause, let in the doubt. It was that emptiness, that flick of a switch. The power of the man in front of me. Man. Not boy. Not the Killian I’d known and loved at sixteen. This was a stranger that I’d known and loved since he’d turned up at the hospital.

  It was too much. I hadn’t taken a breath free of him since all of this started.

  I needed a breath.

  “I need you to give me time,” I choked out, “to figure out if I can do this.”

  His face shuttered. “You’ve had four fuckin’ years!” he exploded.

  I yanked out of his grasp. “I’ve had four fucking years,” I hissed, “but not by choice, Killian. It wasn’t me who wanted those four years. I’m asking for one fricking night to try and breathe without suffocating.”

  Killian stiffened. “I suffocate you?” he asked slowly.

  “Yes. No, I mean no. I just need quiet.”

  “You’ve got quiet with me.”

  I blinke
d at him. “Just give me some space, Killian.”

  It was then the emptiness came back. The look that had been his mask in the ring, the one that had been his default face with everyone but me. It was devoid of feeling. Of anything really.

  He nodded once. “Let me get you home. Then you got your space.”

  I flinched at his voice. It was familiar. It was the voice I’d heard on that dock four years ago. The one that was resigned to good-bye.

  “Whisky for breakfast? Shit, things aren’t well in casa Killian?” Lucky’s voice didn’t make Killian move. He didn’t even lift his head.

  “Fuck off,” he growled.

  Lucky didn’t do as requested. Instead, he slapped him on the back and sat down beside him. “Love you too, bro.”

  He leaned over the bar and poured himself a shot. “Lexie didn’t like The Nutcracker, I’m guessing?”

  Killian gave him a sideways glare.

  “Okay, so we don’t like that name. Hold on, I’ll cross it off the list.” There was a pause. “Done.” Lucky’s face went serious. “Don’t worry, brother, she’ll come around.”

  Killian didn’t say a thing, just went back to contemplating his whisky. He had dropped Lexie off last night without a word. He couldn’t speak to her. He couldn’t actually look at her. The pain was so great. He knew it hurt her, but he couldn’t help it. Fuck, if this was what she felt that day on the dock, if it was what she’d been feeling for four years, Killian had no fuckin’ clue how she’d even decided to give him a second chance.

  One he was certain he’d blown.

  “There a reason why Lexie came home last night and refused to talk to anyone?” Bull’s voice boomed in his ear.

  “Came to the fight. Didn’t like it,” Killian told him.

  There was a long pause. “Fuck,” Bull muttered finally.

  Like Lucky, he sat himself down and poured a shot.

  He silently downed it and glanced at Killian. “You know Lexie’s special,” he began.

  Killian nodded. Of course he fuckin’ knew that.

  “She’s not like any of these women.” Bull nodded to some club sluts hanging around after the victory party last night. Killian hadn’t felt very victorious. He’d shoved every one of them away who tried to sidle up to him last night. Their touch made his skin crawl, polluted it after Lexie had been all over him.