“He won’t find out,” I assure her, confident the men she thinks are her uncle’s enemies aren’t. “But you need to be careful who you talk to. It’s just you and me, all right? No one else.”
Her brutal swallow reveals she understands my underhanded request. I don’t want word getting out that I’m a killer.
“I won’t tell a soul. You have my word, Maddox.”
Some may say I’m a fool for believing her.
I’ll tell you it’s a Walsh trait.
19
Maddox
As we reach the road my family cabin is on, I lower the revs of my motorbike. I’ve taken every back road known, whizzed past the main entrance three times, and rode the last two miles without headlights, hopeful our arrival would occur without fanfare. I should have realized Sloane would detect Demi’s presence half a mile out. She barrels down the front stairs of the cabin before we’re halfway down the driveway, and even quicker than that, she tugs Demi off my bike before removing her helmet.
“He’s dead,” Sloane states matter-of-factly after taking in the bruises on Demi’s face. “Saint, get my gun. I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“You have a gun?” Demi and Saint ask at the same time.
Before Sloane can answer, her focus shifts to the set of keys Caidyn hands me. They were passed over with two overflowing suitcases of clothes. “What’s that? Were they clothes? I’ve told you before, you don’t need to pack clothes for a weekend trip. My parents have everything we need at my family’s country estate.” After bouncing her eyes between a silent Caidyn, Saint, and me, she locks them with Demi’s. “We’re not going to my family’s estate, are we?”
The fact she thinks a couple of days at a country manor is a solution for our predicament shows how little she knows about Demi’s family. Saint didn’t question me when I requested for him to pack Demi’s things. Caidyn was a little more vocal, but more on the location of our hideout than the fact we need to bunker down while planning our next move.
Gratitude smacks into me when Demi slips her hand into mine before she tilts into my side. I thought seeing me kill a man would have her pulling away, not drawing closer. I’m as grateful as fuck it seems as if nothing has changed. “Maddox and I need to get away for a couple of days.” She wets her dry lips before forcing out a set of words I’m certain will hurt her friend but must be said. “I want to go with him. I feel safe with him. He will protect me.”
“Okay,” Sloane replies, her one word groggy. “Then why don’t we come with you guys? We can pretend we’re ranchers living off the land. I’ve got my boots. I’ll go grab them. Anything else we need, I’ll buy on the way.”
Demi stops her dart up the stairs by shooting her hand out to caress her arm. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. Her best friend can see the pleas in her eyes, so I won’t mention the constant shake of Saint’s head.
With her lower lip protruding, Sloane asks, “Can we at least text?”
Demi throws her arms around her neck and hugs her tight. “Every single day. I promise.”
While she adds additional words to her pledge, I jerk my head to the side, wordlessly requesting an impromptu Walsh family meeting. We’re missing Landon, but considering he’d spend the next three hours lecturing me on responsible decision-making, I’d rather he be absent. I don’t have time to burn.
“Has Mom and Dad gone to the Four Seasons?” Our parents have had a timeshare in a two-bedroom condo for over a decade. They usually only visit in the summer, but Saint has the gift of the gab. He convinced them there’s no such thing as too many vacation days.
Saint lifts his chin. “And Landon promised to take Justine back to school this morning, but I still have a bad feeling about this.” He joins me near the trunk of his car. “Running won’t change anything. If you made a deal with Dimitri, then go against it, you’ll haveallsides coming at you.”
“I don’t have much choice, Sebastian. I can’t stay here.” The fact I use his real name exposes how blurry my head feels.
“Why not?” Caidyn intervenes, unaware of the full story. He knows I fought tonight, but he has no clue it was a deathmatch. None of my brothers do. I kept that snippet of information solely between Demi and me. Well, so I thought. My altercation with Agent Moses this evening exposed tonight there’s a massive leak in my boat.
With my head still in the disbelief stage of my remorse, I give a less murderous excuse for my cowardice. “I hit Col Petretti. It wasn’t a fairy tap. I’m reasonably sure I knocked him out.” For the first time in my life, my voice doesn’t have an ounce of cockiness to it. “I think I broke his nose.”
Saint hisses out a cuss, whereas Caidyn straight up shouts his. Their responses expose I was right to hold back all the details of my night. If they think hitting a mobster is bad, imagine their reaction when I tell them I killed a man.
Although I’m riddled with guilt that I ended someone’s life, there’s no denying the truth. “He was hurting Demi. I had to stop him.”
Caidyn freezes with his hand suspended mid-air. “He didn’t… it wasn’t like…” He does a movement with his hands that shouldn’t speak on his behalf, but somehow does. “Right?”
The lost expression on Saint’s face exposes Caidyn kept matters we discussed last night under wraps. I’m not surprised he didn’t rat me out. He’s good like that.
“He didn’t do…that,” I answer, gritting my teeth. “But if I hadn’t arrived, there were no guarantees. It was fucking horrific.” When the crack my opponent’s neck made replays in my head, I involuntarily shiver. “I couldn’t make the shit up I saw tonight.”
Mistaking the shakes of my body as me being cold, Saint tugs off his jacket and hands it to me. “Maybe talk to Dimitri? Things aren’t tight with him and his father. He may help you if it benefits him.”
“Maybe,” I parrot, my head too muddled to think of a better reply. “But for now, I need to get her off her uncle’s radar.” I shift on my feet to face Demi during the ‘her’ part of my comment. She’s still talking to Sloane, but I feel her eyes constantly drifting to me. I don’t know exactly what her plan was when she ran this morning, and in all honesty, I don’t want to know because if it’s anything like I’m thinking, I would have made the scratch in Col’s neck an inch deeper. I’m not a killer, but I’d kill again for Demi without a single thought crossing my mind.
