by Eva Ashwood
Charles shifts his weight, his nostrils flaring as he licks his lips. I can’t tell what’s going on inside his head, and I can feel my body tensing—either to attack him or Alan, I’m not sure which.
“She’s not worth the Davenport name,” Alan continues, a smile curving his lips as if he’s sharing some inside joke with Charles. “Trust me. If you let her back into your life, she’ll ruin you. Let me take care of her.”
“Alan…” Charles’s voice is gruff.
“She’s a worthless whore.” Alan’s gaze flicks to me as he speaks, his lip curling in disgust. “She’s fucked these three men just to gain their protection, but at least I know you’ll be able to see through her act. She—”
Before he can continue, my father roars. There aren’t even any words to it, just an inarticulate sound of fury. He lunges toward Alan, raising his fists. But as he charges toward the other man, three shots ring out, one after the other, reverberating around the chamber with nauseating volume.
My stomach clenches, the world moving in slow motion around me again. Charles’s body hits the ground with a heavy thud, and before I can even scream, I register the way his face twists in pain. Then his eyes go blank.
He’s gone.
My heart pounds in my chest, beating faster even as my father’s heart stops. His tall form is crumpled on the ground with blood pooling slowly around it.
Fucking dead.
I tear my gaze from Charles’s body and meet Alan’s cold eyes, memories flashing through my mind one after the other. I remember this look—this cold, calculating, calm look. It’s not the look of rage, the look that someone gets when they’re about to launch themselves at you, a look that instinctively makes you flinch back. But this is more terrifying, somehow.
It scares the shit out of me, because he always looked like this right before he was about to do something awful. Some animal part of my mind recognizes this look, and fear slithers through me.
It’s like he’s shutting off the last of his humanity, turning into some heartless monster who can’t feel anything.
Not guilt.
Not pity.
Nothing.
“I didn’t want to do that,” he says quietly. Too quietly. It’s eerie, like he’s got no fucking soul. Like he’s empty. He looks back at Charles’s dead body on the floor, not bothering to step aside as the crimson puddle begins to stain the soles of his shoes. “I don’t like messes. I believe I told you that.”
I remember his words in the other bunker after Reagan kidnapped me, and my stomach clenches with nausea. I’ve never known a person who considered other people “messes” before, who would be so willing to kill to maintain order and control over his life.
“That’s why I had to deal with your sister,” Alan goes on, his gaze moving to Gray. His voice is calm and collected, like he’s explaining why grass is green. “I had to act quickly and decisively when she started poking around. It seems Reagan said something to her at a party that she shouldn’t have, and it got her curious about the girl’s past. I didn’t realize Beth was investigating me until it was too late to avert it, to lead her in another direction. She’d learned too much.”
Gray lets out a low noise, partway between a growl and a groan, and I feel like a part of me is dying slowly. His pain is almost unbearable to witness, and I hate Alan more in this moment than I ever have before.
“She told me she wanted to be a journalist. I suppose that’s why she did it—poked around in my life instead of leaving well enough alone.” Alan sighs, an almost haunted look crossing his features. “I had to get rid of her. It was clean, simple. Once it was done, it was done, but… I didn’t like it. She was a promising young woman. She shouldn’t have had to die.” His gaze snaps to mine, his eyes narrowing slightly as his voice hardens. “That’s why I tried to give you a chance to live.”
Oh, fuck.
My lower lip trembles as his words wash over me. I think about the guilt I felt a few months ago when I found out why a second scholarship had opened up, the chance I never should have been given.
Because Beth died, and her family wanted to honor her memory.
Alan takes a step forward, his calm mask slipping as anger twists his features. “But that was a grave mistake. Ever since you showed back up, you've done nothing but sow chaos in my life,” he spits. “I should’ve dealt with you the moment you appeared in Hawthorne again. I should have done this months ago.”
I don’t register the way he shifts his arm and points the gun at me until it’s too late. For as often as time has seemed to slow down in the past ten minutes, it doesn’t do it this time.
There’s no hesitation.
No warning.
Just the loud bang of the gunshot.
I don’t even have time to react before Gray is moving, pushing himself in front of me with such force it knocks the wind out of me, his body flying forward as Alan fires.
Gray takes the bullet with his own body. He jerks in midair as it strikes his gut, then hits the floor with a heavy thud.
I think I scream.
I’m trying to scream, but I can’t hear anything over the roar in my ears.
No. Please, no.
24
I stare down at Gray’s body in horrified shock.
Not him too. Not Gray.
First, Alan killed his sister. And now he’s going to steal Gray’s life too.
Sound filters into my ears again, and I realize that I am screaming. The sound is hoarse and piercing as it tears through my lungs and throat and body.
Alan mutters a curse under his breath as he slips his finger over the trigger. Grimacing, he adjusts his aim to take another shot.
To kill me for real this time.
Before he can fire, Elias rushes him, taking him down in a football tackle. I’ve never seen Elias play, and I know he stopped because of a knee injury—but adrenaline must be making up for the injury now, because he moves so fast he’s almost a blur.
His body crashes into Alan’s with a vicious thud that sends both of them falling to the floor in a heap. The gun flies out of Alan’s grip as they land, skittering across the floor. The older man chokes out a breath, grunting in rage and shoving Elias off him.
Thanks to his goddamn personal trainer and fitness regimen, Alan is more agile than he has any fucking right to be, scrambling away before Elias can twist around and pin him back down. He wraps his hand around the gun again, firing wildly as he surges to his feet.
The bullet penetrates one of the wooden shelves with a deafening crack, and before I can dive for cover, Alan leaps forward and grabs me by the hair. I scream, trying to tear away from him, but his grip is tight, burning, painful.
He yanks my body up from the ground, forcing me to stand in front of him. The tip of the gun presses into my temple with bruising force, the warm metal digging into my skin as I try to suck in a breath, try to pull away from him.
“Back the fuck off!” he yells at the others. “Or I’ll put a bullet in her skull.”
No, no, no…
My heart sinks.
He’s going to try to use me to escape. He knows the men won’t risk him killing me.
My feet stumble as he pulls me backward toward the stairs, keeping the gun pressed against my head. Their eyes never leave me, their faces transformed in pain and fear. My heart thrashes wildly as I look down at my father’s body, completely still now, blood staining his clothes. I look at Gray’s body and my stomach opens up into a bottomless pit. I can’t tell if he’s dead yet, but he’s not moving at all. His chest is covered in blood, his face pale.
Is he gone?
A primal instinct rears up in me. The same one that made me run from the bunker. The same one that made me fight Cliff the night he tried to rape me.
The will to survive. To protect the people I care about.
Fight. Back.
I don’t fucking care about the risks. I don’t even think about them. I just move.
My body slams back
against Alan’s, throwing him off balance as I grab for his forearm, yanking it away from my head. The gun fires as he pulls the trigger, the sound making my ears ring in pain.
Hot liquid drips down my temple and the side of my face from where the bullet grazed me, but the pain is nothing compared to the years and years of rage and anger pulsing through my body in hot waves.
“Bitch!”
Alan’s blunt fingernails sink into my skin as he curses, but I tear my hand from his grip and throw a wild punch.
My fist hits his skull with a hard crack, and the feel of pain in my knuckles snaps some part of me into focus. I hardly know what’s going on, but I let the animal in me take over as I fight back, kicking and hitting and scratching, using my teeth to bite into the skin at his neck like a wild animal. I barely see, barely hear, barely know anything but the raw urge to fight and kill.
I’ve let this monster control my life, manipulate the people around me for too long. I’ve let him win too many times by pulling back into myself, letting fear take over, but not anymore. I will not stop until he’s dead. I will not stop until the lives he’s taken are avenged by his own spilled blood.
Good girl.
Be a good girl and do as I say.
Memories flood back, a fuel to my rage. Memories of him trying to groom me, make me into a little pet just like he did to Reagan. Memories of him telling Cliff that I was his to take, memories of the helpless fury I felt as a child.
I knee him in the gut, hard, and the gun goes flying out of his hands as he clutches his stomach, sucking in a breath. His eyes are wide, bloodshot, and furious, and I imagine that his gaze burns bright red like a demon sent straight from hell, an image that sears itself into my mind with burning intensity.
The world around me goes black except for that face, the face I hate so much, the face that took everything away from me. There’s nothing left except that face, the pain it caused, the life it fucked up, and I’m fighting again, this time not trying to injure and disarm, but to kill.
Kill.
Alan doesn’t deserve to live, not when he’s killed so many. He doesn’t deserve to rot in prison—he deserves to rot where the rest of the people he’s killed are, under layers and layers of dirt, his flesh eaten away by maggots.
I’m lost in a fog, but I’m vaguely aware that the face beneath me is going purple. My hands squeeze tighter and tighter around Alan’s neck until his eyes are rolling back in his head, his hands desperately trying to push away mine, his lungs struggling to pull in a breath…
But then I’m being pulled back out of the darkness. The bunker around me spins back into focus as strong arms hook over mine and drag me away from Alan’s body.
“Blue, he’s down. He’s out! Let go, okay? We need to get out of here. We need to get Gray—”
Gray.
That single word snaps me out of my trance. Shaking my head, I release Alan’s neck from my tight grip. His body slumps to the floor as I stumble over to Gray.
The second I reach him, I throw myself down beside him and check for a pulse, a breath. His heartbeat is so faint I almost don’t catch it, the pulse in his neck a mere flutter.
He can’t die, I think wildly, panic sinking in. We have to get him to safety. We need to get help.
“You need to live,” I plead with him, my hands pressing into the skin on his face, turning his head to look at me. His eyes don’t open. “Fuck. Please! You need to live for me, Gray.”
He groans, but I think it might just be my imagination when I look at the wound in his side, oozing blood. I need to find something to stop the bleeding, need to put pressure on it so we can keep him alive until help comes, but I don’t want to leave his side.
“Elias, look for something to—”
My voice stops dead in my throat as movement catches my eye. Alan’s eyes snap open as he drags in a gasping breath, and he shoves himself up from the floor with a feral groan. His eyes are swollen, his face scratched up, and his neck deeply bruised.
But he’s not fucking dead.
This time, I don’t have a chance to lunge for him. I’m too fucking far away. Going up on his knees, Alan reaches for one of the weapons on a shelf beside him, blood and spit trailing from the corner of his mouth. He snatches it up, his hands trembling as he aims at me and begins to pull the trigger.
But Declan moves faster, his body lunging and thudding on the floor as he scoops up the gun that flew out of Alan’s hands earlier… and shoots.
The bunker is filled with the pop of one more bullet firing, and Alan staggers back, blood spreading over the front of his jacket.
Then he falls.
And this time, I know he won’t get back up. Ever.
25
My heart beats so loudly that it’s all I can hear for a solid minute as I take in the scene around me. My father and Alan are both dead, and Gray is about to die any second if we don’t get him help. I try to meet Declan’s gaze, but he’s staring at Alan with shock in his eyes, glancing between his body and the gun on the floor.
“You had to do it,” Elias tells him gruffly. “It was self-defense.”
Declan doesn’t respond. I want to reach over and take the gun from him, to make sure my fingerprints are on it, but I can’t leave Gray’s side.
“We need to get an ambulance here.” I lick my dry lips. “And cops. Fuck, this looks bad.”
We’re trapped in a hidden underground storage unit with two dead bodies of rich, important people, one of whom I recently accused of kidnapping me. Not to mention the fact that the bunker is loaded with contraband.
“We’re innocent. They’ll see it.” Elias says, but still, I glance over at Alan. Even though I know he really is fucking dead this time, I almost don’t believe it. Part of me still thinks he’ll find a way to manipulate the situation, to pull strings and twist things, even though he can’t do any of that now.
“I don’t have my phone. Does anyone have a signal down here?” I ask. It must have gotten lost in the scramble, but that’s the least of my priorities right now.
Declan pulls his out of his pocket. His fingers tremble as he dials 911. They pick up quickly, and he tells them where we are and how to get here.
“We need to get him help,” I croak, pressing hard against Gray’s wound with the heel of my hand, trying to staunch the flow of blood. “He still has a pulse, but we need to…”
“I know, Blue.” Elias’s voice is strained. “I know. He’ll be okay. The ambulance is coming.”
It seems to take forever. We all sit gathered around Gray in a silent vigil, and I keep my hands pressed against him, desperate to keep him from losing any more blood.
Finally, sirens sound in the distance. My stomach does an unpleasant dip and swoop, and I pray again to that nameless entity I don’t know if I really believe in.
Please, let him live. Fucking please.
We make our way back up to the entrance of the bunker as the sound of sirens grows louder, the sun glaringly hot. I blink against the light, so bright compared to the dim artificial light of the bunker.
An entourage of emergency vehicles shows up, trundling over the uneven ground on the barely-there road. Within minutes of us climbing to the surface, paramedics and police officers flood the scene. I’m not really sure where to stand or what to say or do as they flock around us. The EMTs pull Gray from Declan and Elias’s hold, and several cops head down into the bunker with grim looks on their faces and weapons drawn.
I wrap my arms around myself, ignoring the bruises and cracks on my knuckles as the emergency team gets Gray onto a stretcher, cutting off his shirt and assessing his injury. I want to follow him into the ambulance as they load him up, but the doors close behind him, cutting off my view.
My head swivels on my neck as I search for the other two Sinners in the suddenly crowded clearing. I find Declan off to one side, being questioned by a police officer who’s holding a notepad and jotting down notes. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I know Decla
n’s giving a statement on what happened, something I’ll have to do soon as well.
“Sophie Wright?”
A deep voice catches my attention, and I turn my head to see who said my name. It’s Banning. His face looks more severe than I’ve ever seen it, his eyes hard.
“I need you to tell me what happened here,” he says, lifting his brows slightly. “Everything that happened. You may be asked to come down to the station for questioning as well.”
I nod, but as he proceeds through a list of routine questions about the who and where and how, my mind is blank, numb. All I can think about is Gray’s body inside that ambulance, possibly at the hospital by now. I know they’ll do all they can to save his life, but with his absence comes a fresh wave of fear.
What if he doesn’t make it? What then? I won’t be able to live with the knowledge that he took a bullet for me, laid down his life in place of mine. What will I do if he’s gone?
I don’t have time to think about that, because a cop comes up from the bunker several moments later. “Two victims, both dead on the scene,” he says. “Identified as Alan Montgomery and Charles Davenport.”
Detective Banning steps over to him, glancing back at me before conferring in low voices with the other officer. I look down at the ground, staring blankly at the trampled leaves and grass as I listen to their quiet conversation.
I’m not able to pick up every word amidst the noises and chaos, but I hear enough to get the gist of their discussion.
Security footage… recovered… Montgomery killed Davenport…
As I listen, a knot slowly unwinds in my chest. Alan obviously had this bunker well-protected—including having security cameras set up to record any intruders. He almost certainly would’ve erased the footage if he’d gotten out of the bunker alive. But he didn’t. So video recordings of the entire fucked up confrontation still exist.
Proof that Alan attacked us. Proof that Declan killed him in self-defense.