by Marie James
“How am I safe? Living like this is impossible.”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. Words are impossible right now.
Her soft breaths even out, letting me know that she’s fallen asleep.
My heart aches as it comes apart in my chest. I can’t keep her. She was never mine to possess. Now that the heat is off her with the fire in Andover, I have no sane reason to keep her here.
I close my eyes, resigned with knowing I have to let her go, and that sucks because I didn’t start living until she walked into this clubhouse.
Happiness isn’t a possibility for a monster like me.
Better to let her leave before she discovers just how deep my evil roots actually go.
Chapter 36
Candi
I could sleep all damn day, but the throbbing in my head forces my eyes open only to squint again at the bright sun filtering into the room.
“Why is it so fucking bright in here,” I grumble.
Aside from my rumpled self, the bed is empty. I’m not surprised. Leaving me alone seems to be Lynch’s thing. Heaven fucking forbid I wake up in his arms, lips touching the top of my head as he repeats the things he said last night while I’m sober. I can’t remember the specifics, but I know he was sweet, attentive, and there for me when I was too intoxicated to help myself.
I wince as I roll out of bed. My stomach muscles are tight, no doubt from the heaving I did in front of him last night. Cringing at the memory, I stumble into the bathroom, stripping out of his shirt and climbing right back into the shower. He’s not here to wash me. His hands aren’t gliding over my soap-covered skin, and it makes me miss his touch. It makes me feel a lot of things I shouldn’t even consider, like why I continue to gravitate toward him when all he does is shove me away.
In an effort to shove all of that shit down where it belongs, I rush through my shower and dry off just as fast. Putting my clothes from last night back on is less than ideal, but I’ll be damned if I walk out of here in something belonging to him. I hold my head high as I open the door into the hallway and make my way toward the back door. The walk of shame was made for whores, and since that’s exactly how I feel even though I didn’t sleep with Lynch last night, I own it.
I only make it to the kitchen before rough hands grab me from behind.
I scream, genuinely terrified for the very first time since I arrived. I’d always wondered when one of Lynch’s men would snap and lose control over themselves. Seems like today is that day.
“What are you doing?” I ask, slightly relieved when my captor spins me around to face him. TJ is glaring down at me, but considering I’m Molly’s best friend, I doubt he’ll be the one to hurt me. That doubt begins to fade the second he opens his mouth.
“Prez wants you downstairs.”
My lips turn down. “There isn’t a downstairs.”
A sinister smile paints his lips, and I know immediately what he’s talking about.
The basement.
I’ve heard whispers about that damn place, and it’s nowhere I want to be. My heart races in a frantic tattoo as my fight or flight kicks in. Anticipating my attempt to escape, TJ clutches me tighter, a low rumble emitting from his throat. It sounds like a warning, or maybe a challenge like he’d love nothing better than to give chase if I bolt from him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks instead, never giving me the opportunity to slip away.
The barely controlled rage and evil in his voice is a contradiction to the TJ I thought I knew. The man who kisses his sister’s temple each time he sees her, the man who jokes incessantly, like life is nothing more than a playground is nowhere to be found. He’s been replaced with a man that haunts every woman’s nightmares, the man women run from before they can even see him, as if his evil presence can be felt from miles away.
“I don’t w-want to go down t-there.” My eyes plead with him to let me go as a million scenarios fog my brain. “Tell Lynch to come up here.”
“Oh, Sweet-Tart.” His punishing grip releases one arm so his fingers can brush my damp hair from the side of my face. “Your blood on his hands will kill him.”
He looks into my eyes, searching them as if there’s something I can say, something I can confess that will change the direction things are going.
“There’s nothing worse than betrayal.” He sighs, resigned as he turns me in the direction of the back door. I continue to fight him as he walks us to the door and outside. “We always knew a piece of pussy would make this club fall. We just never thought it would happen so soon.”
“I-I don’t k-know what y-you’re talking about.” The tremble in my voice is impossible to hide.
“Why are you so scared then?” His voice is a challenge in my ear as he reaches for the knob on the basement door.
I dig my feet in hard, but my cheap flip-flops are no match to his strength. I lose them in the struggle to avoid being pushed through the door. “I-I’ve h-heard about w-what happens down there. Please don’t.”
He shakes me again, so hard it stuns me enough he’s able to push me through the doorway. Darkness wraps around us like a living, breathing thing. Stale air hits my nose, and it’s almost enough to make me puke again. My stomach twists and turns, knotting and clenching relentlessly.
I slip more than once as TJ forces me to descend the stairs with rough shoves to my back. They creak under our weight, the rough wood painful against the bare soles of my feet. How I’m concerned about splinters when there are more treacherous things at play right now is beyond me.
“Those stories?” TJ snips in my ear. “Did you happen to tell that information to your d—”
“Dad?” I hiss when my eyes adjust to the single light at the bottom of the stairs. It casts very little around the room, giving it a sinister glow so ominous the stains and shadows seem to come alive.
I gasp at the sight of my father, beaten and bloody, standing on a wobbly chair with a thick rope wrapped around his throat. He’s surrounded by a semi-circle of leather-wearing men. Each one of them is staring in my direction with such hatred in their eyes, I feel as if my skin is covered in spiders. Ronan, standing against the far back wall, is the only one who looks like he might be mildly uncomfortable.
“W-what’s going on?” I ask when my eyes find Lynch’s.
Lynch.
The rope.
What an inopportune time to put two and fucking two together.
He hangs people. The rope around my father’s neck is purposeful. He won’t walk out of here alive, and neither will I.
“You tell me,” he insists, his words emotionless.
Just like the transformation upstairs with TJ, I realize I don’t know this man either. This isn’t the man who held me against his chest last night and promised he wasn’t going anywhere. This isn’t the man who let the shutters slip away from his guarded heart when he looked me in the eye as he claimed my body for the first time.
I don’t want to know this man. I want nothing to do with him.
“I didn’t do anything,” I vow.
It’s not the whole damn truth, because I should’ve told him what happened with my father, but to my credit, he was gone when we got back.
TJ shakes me, forcing my head to snap back and forth on my shoulders so hard my teeth clack together. Lynch flexes his hands at his side. I focus on that. On second look, he’s not indifferent. He’s broken…but resigned. He’s already made his mind up. Just like TJ confessed in the kitchen, hurting me will kill him, but it won’t stop it from happening.
“You’re as useless as your fucking mother,” my dad spits, but I keep my focus on Lynch. He’s not saying anything I haven’t heard before. His words barely register anymore. The father I wanted to love, the father I thought I’d had the early years of my childhood, never actually existed.
Lynch is the only one who can make a difference here. His word is law. He’s the only one who can change the direction of today’s events. Pleading with anyone else won’t
make a bit of difference.
“This isn’t you then?” Lynch tosses down a stack of pictures Briar just handed him.
I didn’t notice Briar until now, but that fucking coward won’t even look my way. As if he’s the only one with morals while every other Ravens Ruin member glares at me with repulsion. He may not agree with what’s going on, but he won’t try to stop it either. His loyalty is with his club.
My eyes dart down, taking in the black and white photos of me walking out of the mall bathroom, and my father taking the same route a few minutes later.
I see the sadness in my eyes in one, only to see my resilience lock into place in the next. I didn’t want to upset Molly, and honestly, at that moment, I didn’t want Smalls to hurt my dad.
“You want me to believe it was pure coincidence that you ended up at Andover with Molly?” The calm, lack of emotion in his voice terrifies me. “Your dad has been after my club for the last twenty-five years, and I’m just supposed to accept that you’re here by chance?”
“He killed my fucking mother!” TJ roars in my ear loud enough to make me shrink away from him as much as I’m able.
“Bullshit,” my dad argues. “I didn’t pull that fucking trigger.”
I almost laugh at the ridiculousness of his words. He’s strung up in a fucking basement in the middle of the Ravens Ruin compound, and he’s arguing semantics? Molly mentioned her mother’s death before but only spoke of her being gone and how she was too young to remember much. She never went into details. I’d assumed it was a car accident or cancer. Before coming to the clubhouse, I presumed that’s how most people died too young. Now I know differently.
“I-I was p-planted,” I try to explain. The waver in my voice makes me think I’m lying myself. There’s no way anyone in this room is going to believe me. Their minds were made up long before TJ shoved me down here, but I can’t not try. I don’t want to die, but especially not for something I’m not guilty of. “I didn’t know anything about it until then, until my dad showed up and told me to get something on the club.”
I tap my foot on one of the pictures since TJ still has a death grip on my arms. I can’t worry about bruises since they won’t matter soon.
“So you’ve only been collecting intel for the last week and a half?”
“What?” My eyes meet Lynch’s. “No. I wouldn’t do that.”
The brokenness I saw on his face has faded away. He doesn’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe me either. The evidence is pretty damning.
“I tried to leave,” I remind him. “You wouldn’t let me.”
TJ releases one of my arms, only to grab a chunk of my hair. He snaps my head back so hard my teeth dig into my bottom lip. The taste of blood fills my mouth a second later.
“We’re going to remedy that today,” TJ hisses in my ear.
Please let it be painless, I pray, knowing that my fate is already sealed.
Chapter 37
Lynch
“Let her go!” I roar when I see Candi’s tongue swipe her lips, leaving a trail of blood behind.
“Don’t go soft over a piece of pussy,” TJ counters with a chuckle I haven’t heard in years. His thirst for blood has grown over recent years, and the tone of his voice makes even me nervous.
“Dad always let the traitors explain,” I barter. Candi cringes at the title.
I know his knife is on his hip, right where it always is. In a split second, I could go from holding all the power in this room to being the one on my knees begging for my life. My baby brother is volatile, to say the least.
“She’s a whore, not a club member,” TJ argues. “The patch on those traitors’ backs is the only thing that has ever afforded them the luxury to explain. She doesn’t deserve another second alive for betraying us.”
“Let. Her. Go.”
To my surprise, TJ releases his brutal hold on her. The second she’s steady, her eyes find mine again. She’s silently begging me to save her, to not let my men tear her apart. If only she knew how little control I have over this situation. If only she knew the sacrifice I’ll make once her betrayal is avenged.
“How easy was this for you?” I ask instead. Tears fill her eyes, pooling on her dark lashes. “How disgusted you must have been last night telling me that you loved me.”
“Fucking whore,” Dietrich Miller spits behind me.
Spinning around, I sucker punch him in the nose so hard he almost falls off the stool. I stare, watching expectantly as he teeters before steadying himself. I expect to turn around and see her afraid for her dad, but her eyes are still on mine. She doesn’t spare him a glance. There’s something to that. Something thrilling about it that makes the angry tiger in me want to prove to him just how much control I have over her body, how it sings when I get close. Would she object if I stripped her bare and fucked her right in front of her dad? It may be enough to send the poor fucker leaping from the chair without one of us having to kick it out from underneath him.
“I didn’t say those things. I never would.”
Her denial rips me from the fantasy that’s only moments away from coming to fruition.
“Because it would be a lie?” My fists clench at my sides.
Her head drops, and her shoulders tremble with sobs. I almost reach for her, almost stretch out my hand to comfort her the way I did last night when she was sick.
“Because loving you is the only secret I have.” She tilts her tear-stained eyes in my direction. “Please do more research before you do this.”
I stand, staring at her for a lifetime without saying a word. Is it her hold on me, the tangled web I’ve been caught up in, or is it sincerity in her eyes? I’m too fucking emotionally damaged from the shit I’ve dealt with from birth to distinguish the difference. Whenever I’ve had these questions in the past, I go with instinct, seek and destroy, maim and kill, but this time I pause. Waiting for what? A divine intervention? A miraculous change in the evidence Hornet provided this morning before the sun even came up?
TJ begins pacing behind her, growing increasingly agitated that blood isn’t staining the concrete floor yet. He’s never been one to care for confessions. If we have proof, he wants blood, but in my gut, I feel like we moved on this too fast. Within an hour of discovery, Miller was grabbed out of his own bed in a shitty motel in Worcester and tied up in the basement. When he was grilled for information, all he would say is, “why don’t you ask your whore.” He threw her to the wolves, or the Ravens as it were, and TJ, after only a second of indecision went upstairs to get her.
“Please,” she begs again, only this time she takes a step in my direction.
She sees the monster. She knows now what I’m capable of, and she still closes the distance between us. My heart kicks in my chest, but I shove it back into stasis. Her willingness to stand by me in the darkness doesn’t make her betrayal any less factual.
“You’ve been Molly’s friend for years.”
“Yes,” she answers.
“You told me your name was Zoe Clark.”
Sticking with the facts is the only thing I can do right now.
“It is.” Her voice is still unsure. She’s a smart girl. She isn’t looking at this line of questions to mean that she’s off the hook. I just need to wrap my head around what’s going to happen before it actually does. She’ll tell me her truth because she’s just as resigned as I am.
“This piece of shit is your father,” I confirm. “That makes you a Miller.”
Her head shakes immediately. “My parents were never married. My mother gave me her last name.”
“That fucking bitch taunted me constantly about not being good enough to have children named after me,” Miller seethes behind me.
TJ’s hand hovers over his knife, fingers twitching against the handle, but he steps away from her, making another circuit of the small room.
Without pulling her eyes from mine, she says, “My mother always told me he didn’t want me to have his last name.”
Mill
er chuckles. He has to be fucking psychotic considering a rope is around his neck, and he’s standing on a fucking chair. “That would’ve ruined everything. That Princess Whore being friends with a Miller would be too suspicious.”
I don’t pull my eyes from Candi as Miller moans in pain. I know either TJ or Briar just stabbed him. In the stillness of the room, I can hear his blood dripping on the floor.
“He doesn’t even know does he?”
I turn at the taunt, finding Miller glaring at Briar with blood slipping from his mouth and a new wound in his side.
Briar doesn’t say a word, merely drawing his phone from his pocket when it chimes with a text alert. I turn my attention back to Candi. We only have a few short moments left together, and I want every second I can have looking into her dark eyes.
Briar steps closer, leaning in close to my ear. “Phone records show that she hadn’t spoken to him for weeks before she arrived at the clubhouse.”
He lifts the phone to show me the text. Hornet was sent out before dawn to locate the snitch we had following Miller. Slowly information has been trickling in all morning, but at a snail’s pace. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to work through this before setting everything into motion. The picture above the last text is one of the junkie’s mutilated body. It doesn’t faze me, death never does.
While reading over the text Hornet sent for the third time, another text comes through. It’s a video link. With the phone still held in Briar’s hand, I tap the triangle and let it play, even though I have no fucking clue what’s going to come from the phone.
Video of Miller walking down the street fills the screen as the video expands.
“She doesn’t have a fucking clue,” Miller tells someone on the phone.
The video doesn’t look very old, but without further research, I can’t be a hundred percent sure when it was recorded.
“I don’t give a shit,” he spits angrily into the phone. “She’s put herself in fucking danger, and I don’t fucking care if Zoe dies, so long as we get what we need.”
My eyes jolt up to Candi. She swallows thickly, but the pain and anguish that was in her eyes earlier are gone.