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She exhales. It’s a long one and then she lifts her hand. I stop breathing when she brushes her fingers along my cheek. “They hit you. You’re bruising. Everywhere.”
And I’d go through each and every hit again to protect her. My only regret is that we ended up here.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know how else to protect Brandon.”
“We did what we had to.”
Violet rests her head into the crook of my neck, and when she raises my jacket to my shoulder again, it stays. I weave my arms around her and rub my hands up and down her cold arms, almost like I’m trying to convince a dying fire to stay burning.
“Why is this happening?” Her breath tickles my neck, and I wish we were anywhere but this damp, cold prison.
“I don’t know.” Yeah, Cyrus had warned us off the road, but I don’t know why they would target Violet. Why they would target me. Odds are it’s me. My grandfather’s the president of the Terror and my uncle is the man the Riot hates the most. The Riot feels Eli stole their daughter and their granddaughter even though Meg and Emily left Eli, too.
Maybe the Riot decided to play out an eye for an eye, and I’m the closest Eli has to a blood child in the state. “Guess it was me they were after and you were caught up in it.”
“The Riot hasn’t kidnapped anyone before.”
Beat the hell out of members of our club? Yeah. Killed people belonging to our club? That, too. But I agree, at least from my limited knowledge, kidnapping wasn’t their style. “If they wanted us dead, we would be.”
She snorts. “You need to work on your comforting skills.”
My lips slightly turn up. “Noted.”
She settles further into me, her arm curving around my body. “What do we do now?”
Not much. We stay alive and... “We wait.”
“For?”
She’s not going to like my answer. “The club will figure this out. Eli and Cyrus will get us.”
The way her body tenses under mine is a confirmation of her disbelief that the club will make the situation better. I want her to have faith in them. I want Violet to be part of our family again.
“Waiting is its own form of torture, isn’t it?” she says. “I’m not sure if waiting and thinking of all the horrible things that can happen is worse than what will actually be done.”
I cling tighter to her as my own demons and nightmares awaken. The what-if’s messing with my mind are the torture she speaks of. Anything happening to me isn’t the problem. I’m plagued with thoughts of what will happen to her.
Fear.
I’ve never been scared by much. Never believed in bogeymen living under the bed. Magic and sorcery belong to people like me who have fast hands and can deceive the human eye. It’s hard to believe in evil locked in closets when you realize at an early age it’s all made-up stories to explain what people think is unexplainable.
It’s not unexplainable—only mere men manipulating shadows and mirrors.
But there’s a bitterness in my mouth now. A metallic taste I don’t like much. A coldness in my blood and a freezing in my bones at the thought of what the men outside that door could do to Violet.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
Me, too.
I strain to hear anything beyond her breaths and my heartbeat in my ears. Occasionally there are footsteps overhead. Muffled voices. The sound of the ascending and descending of the old wooden staircase. Violet curls closer into me whenever there is movement outside the door, and I keep up a steady caress up and down her arm.
My gut tells me we’re in here for a while. Tells me that they want us to be tormented by our own thoughts before the next round.
“Do you think Brandon’s okay?” she eventually asks.
I pray he is. I pray harder he kept his courage and called Eli for help. Faster the club gets involved, the faster we’ll be out of this mess. “Yeah. Your brother is a fighter.”
“No, he’s not. He’s scared of the world and most everything in it.”
