The Way We Are

by Shandi Boyes

  I grit my teeth. I knew there was more to their relationship than mutual attraction. He's using Savannah’s predicament to his advantage with the hope that once he has milked the cow dry, she will be so dependent on him, she’ll have no choice but to stay with him.

  I’ve got news for him.

  “I’ll get you the money,” I say, my tone confident. “But if you get within two hundred feet of Savannah, I’m not only going to tell your uncle about his missing millions; I’m gonna put all the blame on your shoulders.”

  Axel’s lips twitch as he struggles to hold in his smile. “I like a man with gall, but there's no fucking chance in hell you can pin that bitch’s theft on me.”

  “Don’t underestimate me, Axel,” I warn, stepping closer to him so his whiskey-laced breath fans my lips. “You were surrounded by the law yesterday, yet you still left with a black eye. Do you really want to test my pull for a second time in under twenty-four hours?”

  “The law doesn’t belong in our negotiations, Ryan,” he replies with a huff. “Involving them will be bad for all involved—including Savannah.”

  I shrug, acting impassive. “They don’t have any interest in a small fry like Savannah. They want the big fish. I can give it to them.”

  “Then you’ll be a dead man,” Axel snarls.

  A smile cracks onto my lips. “As long as I take you down with me, I’m okay with that.”

  Axel glares at me like I have two heads. “You’re serious? You’re willing to die for her?” he asks, the fire in his eyes matching mine.

  Ignoring the way he sneered “her” made my back molars grind together, I nod my head. I’ll do anything to save Savannah—even diving into the depths of hell to save her for the second time.

  Axel scrubs his hand along the stubble on his chin. Although he has a good poker face, his eyes are his enemy. They reveal that not only is he devastated at the prospect of losing Savannah, but also that, just like me, he's contemplating facing a death sentence for her. That pisses me off more than anything. He left her to die yesterday, only to pretend she's worth fighting for today.

  He isn’t just unstable; he is insane.

  Just when I think Axel is never going to respond to my proposal, he says, “You have a week. If the 200K isn’t in my hands by next Sunday, our deal is over.”

  I glare at his hand as if it's covered in spit when he holds it out in offering. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, but I still accept his gesture. I’m man enough to know nothing in his industry is approved without official confirmation, but I’m not stupid enough to see it as any more than a lie.

  Axel stiffens when I use our joined hands to pull him into my chest. “If you even think about playing me, I’ll know. Then I’ll be forced to retaliate.” My voice is so rough, it sounds like it was delivered straight from hell. “I won’t just die for Savannah, Axel. I’ll kill for her as well.”

  It's lucky Axel can’t see my face, as even it acts surprised by my threat. My eyes widen as sweat dots my top lip. I’ve never been an overly violent person... until it comes to protecting the people I love. I love Savannah—more than she will ever know.

  31

  Ryan

  Axel leaves my room without another word. I wait for the rev of his engine before darting to my bed. The shuddering of my heart wreaks havoc with my hands when I attempt to grip the box my bundles of notes are stashed in. I’m terrified I’ve just made a horrible mistake.

  I have seven days to turn a little over fifty thousand dollars into two hundred thousand dollars. If that isn’t concerning enough, I then have to hand my hard-earned money over to a man I trust even less than my father. This is all kinds of fucked up.

  My worry grows when I notice how neatly the lid is sitting on my old shoe box. Even with me raiding my savings to fund Amelia’s prom experience yesterday, the dent shouldn’t be significant enough to lower the height this much.

  With my heart throbbing in my throat, I throw off the lid. The walls crumble in on me when I glare down at base of my shoe box. Not a bill can be seen. Not one.

  Fuck.

  I rest my backside on the balls of my feet as my hands rake through my hair. Weeks of putting my body on the line for once instead of my heart vanished in an instant. This can’t be happening. Not now. Not after everything that has happened the past twenty-four hours.

  My first thoughts drift to my father, but in all honesty, I highly doubt it's him. He never comes into my room, and the rare occasion he did when I was younger, it wasn’t because he was expecting to find thousands of dollars hidden under my bed. He only entered to fill my head with the false promises he loved issuing when drunk.

  This could have only been one person, the one person who places my father above anyone else. My mother.

  Goddammit!

  My brisk strides down the hallway slow when an uneasy voice murmurs, “It wasn’t her.”

  I spin on my heels so fast, a lack of sleep isn’t the only thing causing havoc to my senses. Damon has his shoulder propped on the doorjamb of his room. His hair is mussed in a messy style, and his eyes are also tired, indicating his night was as eventful as mine.

  A restless night isn’t the only thing his eyes are revealing, though. They display he knows why my face is reddened with anger and my fists are balled. He knows about my hidden stash.

  “You took my money.” I’m not asking a question; I’m stating a fact.

  “It’s not your money,” Damon denies, his voice picking up with anger. “That’s our money. Our ticket to freedom. Our only way out of this hell-hole.”

  Although he doesn’t directly answer my question, his reply tells me everything I need to know. He took my money.

  Air evicts Damon’s lungs in a grunt when I barge past him to hunt for my money in his room. His space is nearly a direct replica of mine, just ten times messier. Not only does he have a month’s worth of laundry on the floor, but he has several empty cans of bourbon, a used bong, and numerous other drug paraphernalia.

  “What the fuck, Damon?” I murmur, stunned as fuck. I knew he’d spent the last few months flying under my radar, but I had no clue he was flying this low. “Did you spend my money on drugs?”

  “No,” he replies, shaking his head.

  I may have believed his grumbled comment if he didn’t sniff at the same time his glassy eyes connected with mine.

  “Jesus, Damon. You’re sixteen years old—”

  “Going on thirty!” he roars, his anger as wrathful as mine. “You know what it’s like living with him. We didn’t have a childhood. We had responsibilities we should have never had. I’ve aged more the past year than I have the past decade.”

  “Then you should be more mature, not turning to drugs for solace—”

  “I take them to forget!” he interrupts, his voice loud enough to wake up half the continent. “You don’t know what it's like. You’ve got friends, a job, the fucking means to leave this place for dust. I’ve got nothing.”

  I stare at him, shocked by his outburst. Yes, he has grown up in the same house as me, but up until a few months ago, I sheltered him from our dad’s antics. He has no clue how bad it’s been. He never cleaned the blood from our mother’s face when our dad’s fist split the skin on her cheek. Or sat with her while she spilled lie after lie to the dentist when she had the chip his brutality caused to her front tooth fixed. I saved him from experiencing that. Me. And how does he repay me? He steals from me.

  “Where is my money, Damon?!” I roar, throwing his clothes over my shoulder as I search his room like an officer with a search warrant. “I swear to god if you’ve spent a single dollar on drugs, I’ll show you how bad it can be.”

  “It’s not your money,” he denies again. “You said it was for us. That we were getting out of this place. I’m not going to let her ruin that for us.”

  I stop rummaging through his drawers. He didn’t sneer “her” like he usually does when referring to our mother. He said it like he did when expressing
anger for Savannah’s reappearance in my life months ago. I thought his anger was from needing to shoulder some of the responsibility for our mother’s care. I had no clue it was directed at Savannah.

  When our gazes collide and I see the fury in his eyes, something inside me snaps. I have him pinned to the wall by his throat before I complete an entire blink.

  “It’s not your money. It’s not even mine. It’s her money. It’s hers!” I scream into his face, my words as violent as the hold I have on him. “She needs this, Damon. If I don’t get back that money, she’ll never be free. Do you understand that? Do you understand that you're sentencing her to a fate as bad as our mother’s if you don’t return that money to its rightful owner?”

  The anger in my tone weakens when I spot the moisture brimming in Damon’s glassy gaze. “I just want to get out,” he stammers. I’m certain his heart is hammering as fast as mine. “I don’t want to hurt Savannah, I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to end up like him, Ryan.” A tear rolls down his ashen face when he chokes out, “I hit Molly. I fucking hit her.”

  When I release the collar of his shirt, shocked by his confession, he slides down to the floor in a heap. The thud of his backside hitting the floor has nothing on the tormented cry tearing from his throat. He sounds truly devastated.

  “I fucking love her, but I still hit her.” He stares at his hands, as if stunned they were capable of such violence. “She wasn’t even saying anything wrong; I just didn’t want to hear the truth.” His hand shakes when he runs two fingers down his left cheek. “Right here. I slapped her right there.”

  When he cradles his tear-soaked face in his hands, I crouch down in front of him. I want to promise it was a one-off mistake that will never happen again, but knowing the statistics on domestic violence, I keep my mouth shut, deciding instead to use actions instead of words.

  “I didn’t mean it. I swear, I didn’t,” Damon murmurs into my neck when I band my arms around his chest to tug him into my torso. “It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to stop it. I’d been drinking and had a shit week. I know I shouldn’t have taken it out on her. She was just... there.”

  When he raises his baby blue irises to me, it feels like I’ve been sucker punched. He looks so much like me, we are often referred to as twins instead of brothers. “I don’t want to be like him, Ryan. Please don’t let me end up like him.” He buries his head in my chest to hide the moisture sliding down his cheeks.

  “I’ll get you out, Damon. I promise I’ll get you out of here,” I pledge into his ear a short time later, the hammering of my heart resonating in my tone. “But I can’t do that without the money you took. I can’t save anyone if I don’t have access to that money.” You can hear the plea in my tone. I can only hope his desperation to escape reality didn’t make him blow 50K on nothing.

  I wait for the shakes hammering Damon’s body to ease before drawing back so he can see my eyes. I want him to see the honesty there, because it’s my solemn promise that I will do everything in my power to stop him from following in our father’s footsteps. I’ll even sacrifice my own happiness if I must.

  “Do you have my money, Damon?”

  Damon removes the snot dribbling from his nose with the back of his hand before nudging his head to his closet. “It’s in my backpack. I didn’t spend any, I swear. I was just keeping it safe for you.”

  After squeezing his shoulder to issue him my thanks, I move to his closet. Some of the cracks his confession caused to my heart are soothed when I secure his ratty school bag in my hands and tug down the zipper. Although I can’t be one hundred percent certain all my original money is here without physically counting it, I truly don’t believe Damon set out to steal from me. He was merely trying to secure his freedom. I can’t blame him for that.

  I tug three hundred dollar bills from the stack before moving to stand in front of Damon. “I have to run an errand, but when I’m back, we’ll figure out a way to get you to Aunt Kaci’s. It’s going to take me around a week to get some funds together, but when I do, we’ll devise a better plan.”

  I expect Damon to protest me sending him hundreds of miles away from home, so you can imagine my shock when he merely nods his head before accepting the money from my grasp.

  “What about mom?” he asks, his tone as low-hanging as his head.

  A weak smile cracks onto my lips, grateful that even when surrounded by turmoil, he’s still thinking of others. It won’t fix the mistake he made with Molly, but it's a step in the right direction.

  “Don’t worry about Ma. I’ve got everything covered,” I assure him.

  I squeeze his shoulder for the second time, wishing I was better with words. There are a hundred things I want to say to him, but none of them are required when I see the remorse in his eyes. What he did was wrong, but the fact he's acknowledging his mistake gives me hope we aren’t too late to stop him from becoming a domestic violence statistic.

  “Molly won’t return any of my calls, Ryan. I haven’t seen her since it happened,” Damon confesses, staring down at his hands like they are solely to blame for his transgression. Although it was his hand that struck Molly, this goes way deeper than a physical element.

  “She’s gonna need time, Damon. If you truly want her forgiveness, you should give her some time to think.”

  He raises his eyes from his fists to me. “What if she never comes around?”

  “Then that’s her choice. It’s not yours to make. You can’t force someone to forgive you, no matter how bad you need it.”

  Although my reply adds to the torment brewing in his eyes, I’d rather tell him the truth than lie to him. He’s been fed so many lies during his short sixteen years, I’m not willing to add another one to the stack.

  “Are you gonna be alright if I leave you for around an hour?”

  I hate leaving him like this, but I’m juggling so many things at the moment, I’m bound to drop a ball if I don’t keep my focus centered. And considering Savannah’s life was already in jeopardy last night, I’m not willing to put it back on the line so soon.

  Damon jerks his chin up. “Yeah, I’ll be alright.” He stands from his slumped position, strengthening the assurance in his voice. “I’ll call Aunt Kaci in a bit. See if she's up for some company.”

  This time my smile is genuine. “This will be good for you, Damon. They say a change is as good as a vacation. You get to have both.”

  “Yeah. Hopefully.” His reply isn’t as strong as I’d like, but it’s better than denial.

  I curl my arm around his shoulders and tug him into my chest. “You’re not like him, Damon. You made a mistake, that’s all,” I whisper into his ear, determined not to let him become a statistic on males raised in households affected by domestic violence. “You’re a good kid; you just need to remember that. You’re only a kid.”

  After a final squeeze, I spin on my heels and exit his room, praying he won’t see the moisture burning my eyes. He’s got enough guilt on his plate. He doesn’t need any more.

  Just before I hit the hallway, Damon shouts my name. He waits for me to face him before saying, “She's going to ruin you, you know?”

  “No,” I disagree, shaking my head. “Savannah isn’t ruining me. I’m ruining her—I’m just too selfish to stop it.”

  With a grin tugging his lips, he replies, “I wasn’t talking about Savannah. I was talking about our mom.”

  32

  Ryan

  “Where did you get this money?”

  Savannah frantically zips Damon’s backpack closed before scanning the park we are sitting in. Because our get together was delayed by Damon’s disclosure, she has changed into her favorite denim shorts and green spaghetti-strap shirt. Well, I thought they were her favorites. Only now do I realize she doesn’t have a choice but to wear them often.

  Confident we don’t look any more suspicious than the regular Ravenshoe teens who mill around playgrounds, Savannah returns her massively dilated gaze to me. “Did
you rob a bank?”

  The straightforwardness of her question causes me to laugh. She knows me well enough to know I made this money illegally, but not well enough to know it was earned in fighting rings not organized by Axel’s uncle.

  “No,” I answer when Savannah shoots me an evil glare, peeved by my delay and dash of laughter in my voice. “I earned that money.”

  “Legally?” she asks, her voice as high as her arched brow.

  When my Adam’s apple bobs up and down, she murmurs, “Ryan, what did you do?” Although she's asking a question, the truth smacks into her before I can reply. “You fought again, didn’t you?”

  She cuts me off for the second time in less than thirty seconds. “I told you not to get involved with those men. Once they have their hooks into you, they never let go. Even though you won, in their eyes, you have their money, and they’ll do everything in their power to have it returned to them.”

  “Then we’ll give it to them,” I imply with a shrug.

  Savannah stares at me like I’m a lunatic. She looks like she wants to say something, but her mouth is refusing to relinquish her words.

  Although her confused expression is nearly as cute as the faces she pulls at the height of ecstasy, I explain, “You know these men. You know how they operate. So you’re the best person to turn this fifty grand into a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Savannah’s mouth forms a large O, but she remains as quiet as a mouse. If there wasn’t tension stealing oxygen from the air, I’d find something to fill the hole. It would be as corrupt as all the other roguish thoughts filtering through my mind the past ten minutes.

  “How many months did you attend the fighting ring with Axel?”

  I’m hoping since I’ve asked a question, she’ll be forced to interact. Unfortunately, I’m left stumped for the fifth time today when she remains silent.

  It takes another thirty seconds before Savannah’s mouth finally cooperates with the prompts of her brain. “Buy-ins are capped at twenty thousand. The organizers did that to ensure no one is taken for a ride by an owner introducing a professional into the circuit. If you’re thinking you’re going to earn in excess of two hundred thousand in a night by fighting, you're sadly mistaken. The most you’ll take home is twenty, perhaps forty thousand if you can find two owners willing to match your purse, but your chances are low, Ryan. Very very low,” she advises, her knowledge strengthening what I already assumed: she’s deeply imbedded in the scene.