Well, so I thought.
“There’s only one ticket in my bag, Demi. It has your name on it.”
I shove him back two places, too angered to care my push shatters his heart as much as it does mine. “We’re in this together. If you go, I go. If you die, I die. That’s what we agreed upon. That’s whatyoupromised.” My voice cracks when the reasoning behind his roller-coaster moods the past couple of days pummels into me. He wasn’t tired. He was disappointed in himself. That’s what morally ethical men feel when they renege on a promise.
“You went against me.” When Maddox shakes his head, I shout,” Yes, you did! If you sided with him, you went against me.” I thrust my hand at the freezer door like my uncle is standing behind it.
Maddox uses my flung-out arm to his advantage. He curls his hand around my wrist before tugging me closer to him, where he tries to fool me like I’m not accustomed to the trickery of this horrible existence. “My deal is with Ezra. He made it impossible to give up. This will let me keep my promise, Demi. It’ll keep you safe.”
“Ezraworksfor my uncle! He’s paid to do as he is told.”
Striving to wake myself up, I yank on my hair. This can’t be real. I must be having a nightmare. Nothing happening makes any sense. Maddox only said two weeks ago that us sticking together would see us through this, so what happened to change his mind so quickly?
I’m pushed to the brink of a panic attack when Maddox says, “If I agree to a seven-year sentence with the eligibility for parole in three, your debt with your uncle and Dimitri will be wiped clean. You’ll be free.”
I can see why my uncle’s offer has sparked an interest out of him—I would have accepted a much harsher penalty for the same result—but this isn’t how it’s meant to go down. I was born into this life. Maddox was forced into it, so if anyone should be freed first, it should be him.
“Tell him no.”
Maddox stares at me like I am insane. “No. I can’t.”
“Why?” Even though I am asking a question, I don’t give him the chance to answer. “We will renegotiate, come up with a better deal.” When I fail to conjure up a better plan on the fly, my breaths turn ragged. The wheeze of my lungs won’t stop me from announcing the obvious, though. “Inmates aren’t free, Maddox, so you need to remove that suggestion from the table.”
When my reply is chopped up by ragged, wheezy breaths, Maddox tries to subdue my panic by rubbing his thumbs over the veins protruding in my wrists.
I slap his hands away. I’m so mad at him, so very devastated.
“Demi—”
“No!” cracks out of my mouth like a whip. “This isn’t fair.Wehad an agreement.”
“An agreement I can’t keep if I want to be the man you deserve. He’s killing me, Demi. What he’s getting me to do day in and day out is slowly killing me.” The absolute honesty in his voice breaks my heart. “There are women, and kids… and fucking babies.”
The pain in his eyes exposes I only know a fraction of the stuff he’s endured the past fourteen days. My uncle has dragged him to the depths of hell, but instead of striving to help him claw his way out of the carnage, I’m selfishly arguing for him to stay there.
That makes me a terrible person, and it changes my fight in an instant.
When I band my arms around Maddox’s neck to hug him tight, he pulls me in close before tucking his head into my neck. “I don’t want to become him, Demi,” he whispers against my sweat-slicked skin, his lips quivering. “He’s changing who I am. He’s killing my soul.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to become him. I understand.” My heart is in tatters, but I still know this is the right thing to do. “Three years is nothing. We kept our crushes hiddenwaylonger than that, so three years will fly by.” My reply would be more convincing if it were said without a heap of tears and snot. I usually have a better hold on my emotions, but today, my heart truly feels like it’s being ripped out of my chest.
I lied last night when I said drowning was the cruelest way to die.
This hurts ten times more.
4
Maddox
One month later…
The packed-to-the-rafters courtroom chamber hisses in disbelief when the judge says, “I sentence Maddox Richard Walsh to life behind bars without eligibility for parole.”
When he smacks his gavel onto the podium, the lawyer Ezra assigned to my case leaps to his feet. He’s as far out of the Petretti family business as you can get, so you can picture how green around the gills he got when I used attorney-client confidentiality to explain why I was confessing to a murder I didn’t do.
I’ve seen some sick fucking shit in my life. I thought my sister being mauled by a dog, Col forcing his niece’s lips to land on his, and the time he dragged the blade of his knife up Demi’s chest would remain at the top of my sick list, but many things my first two weeks under Col’s command gave my top contenders a run for their money.
Death was everywhere. Men, women, and children. I smelled it on my skin no matter how hard I scrubbed it, and I saw it everywhere I looked. It was getting so bad, even eating was more a chore than a pleasure. I’m not ashamed to admit I was struggling, but I am embarrassed to say Demi was subjected to my dithering moods.
