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“She was Ace’s sister. She was like a sister to Blais too, but she was more than that to me. She was a good person, the best person I’ve ever met.” My voice cracks thinking about her, and her gorgeous smile that could light up a room. “I loved her.”
Zamira nods her head in understanding, but she doesn’t press for more of my feelings. She knows I don’t like to talk so she’s lucky I gave her as much as I did. “What happened to her?”
“Novak killed her.” Ice coats my veins thinking about what that motherfucker did to her. How we didn’t fucking protect her from that monster.
“How do you know that?”
“You don’t believe me?” The threat of my anger ready to burst over is clear in my voice. She stiffens against me, her hand stopping the tiny circular movements she was making on my chest, but doesn’t make an attempt to pull away.
“Of course I do. I’m just wondering how you know he killed her and why you waited this long to get him.” She shrugs a shoulder while keeping herself draped over my body.
“We’ve been searching for a long time, tracking people down to get answers and they finally led us back to Novak.” I’m not about to tell her that we started killing vile people as a way to hunt down Allie’s killer, but then it turned into just finding the worst kind of people to kill that have done bad things and gotten away with it. I’m not about to say that we get off on killing, knowing that those who don’t get punished by the law find punishment at our hands.
She has to have an idea that we aren’t fucking normal. I mean we have a damn torture chamber for fuck’s sake, not to mention the fact we kidnapped her, tortured her, killed Tony in front of her, and now we have Novak bleeding out down there. Not your typical activities by any normal person, but I’m not going to divulge all of our secrets.
“Your search led back to Novak?” She looks at me, resting her chin on my chest with her brows furrowed. Damn, she’s gorgeous. Her pretty pink just-fucked cheeks make me want to slam inside her again, but we’re in the middle of a serious fucking conversation.
“Yeah.” It took a long fucking time to figure it out and a lot of planning to make sure we knew for sure, but we finally have him right where he should be. He will die tonight and I’ve never felt more relief about something in my life. I just hope Blais and Ace are torturing the shit out of him like I know they want to. Like I want to.
“Does Ace know?” Confusion wraps around me for a brief moment, before I realize she’s asking if Ace knew about me and Allie. I’m not sure if I trust her enough to tell her the truth, but I can’t risk her blabbering to Ace if I lie.
“No,” I grunt, knowing I might be making a mistake. I hate myself every day for not telling Ace. He’s my brother, and he deserves to know, but she wasn’t ready to tell him. If I tell him now, I’m not sure he’d ever forgive me, and he and Blais are the only people I have left in this world.
“Do you still love her?” she asks softly, trying to not push me too hard. This really isn’t the conversation I want to be having with the first woman I’ve felt anything for since Allie’s been gone.
“I’ll always love her, she was special to me. Everything to me. She didn’t look at me like I was different, she looked at me like I was her world. But all I can do now is remember the love we shared. She would’ve wanted me to be happy, to move on with my life. If she saw me now, I don’t think she’d like the man I’ve become.”
The fact of knowing Allie would be disappointed in me is something I live with every day. She would hate seeing me like this. Seeing the monster I am. I’m not the same man she fell in love with and I’ll never be him again. The only thing that remains is the shell of the man she saw something in.
“A man who loves his brothers unconditionally? A man who would do anything to find the man that killed the woman he loved?” That’s pretty big talk for a woman who is supposed to be upholding the law, not encouraging criminal tendencies. Her voice is telling me to be rational, but it’s hard knowing the demons that lie inside me.
“No. A monster. Someone she’d be afraid of. A fucking murderer, like you’ve called me multiple times. That’s who I am now, Zamira.” Pain ripples through my voice, but I try to tame it.
“Look at me.” She cups my face, forcing me to look at her. “We all have demons. We do bad things for the sake of good.” I’m not sure if she’s trying to convince me of that or herself. She seems to be lost in thought even though she’s looking directly at me.
“Is that why you lost it on Novak?” I let the question linger between us, waiting for her to respond. She’s just like me and will shut down if I push too hard so I have to be patient even though I want to rip the words out of her throat and know every single wrong that has happened to her so I can fix them.
“He didn’t know what he was talking about.” She releases my face trying to look away, but I don’t let her.
I grab her chin, keeping her eyes locked on mine. “We all have demons, remember?” I give her the same words she just gave me, hoping she’ll understand it’s okay to be a little fucked up inside.
“I-I…I’ve done bad things too for the sake of good.” Her voice wavers, but I encourage her to keep going. “I killed Tommy.” She lets out a loud sigh, laying her head back down drawing figure eights on my chest once again.
We already knew that, but I can’t help feeling there’s something more to this story.
“Did you want to kill him?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know, maybe.” She sniffles against my chest, trying to hide the wetness falling against my skin. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“We always have a choice.” It’s the truth, no matter how hard it might be to accept.
“Are you trying to make me feel like shit?” she spits out, lifting her head to look me in the eyes. This is how I know her and I are similar, because we both get defensive when provoked.
“No. We always have a choice, between doing the right and wrong thing. That doesn’t always mean the right choice is the one the law would agree with. It’s okay to accept the darkness inside you.” Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands when no one else will protect you.
“Tommy wasn’t a good man like he wanted the world to believe. Like he wanted me to believe when I met him. He hurt me. There were times he’d be good to me, so good, but there were plenty where I couldn’t get out of bed for days or where I couldn’t open my swollen eyes.” She gulps loudly. “He would beat me when he was mad, but he’d always apologize later and try to make it up to me. I-I couldn’t take it anymore. So one day, he was being sweet, showing me that helovedme, telling me he was sorry for hurting me. The cycle would always continue if I didn’t stop it, so I stabbed him and made it look like self-defense even when it wasn’t. He wasn’t coming at me. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. Something inside me snapped and I felt like I needed to protect myself from the never-ending cycle.” My hand tightens on her back, getting angrier the longer she goes on.
“He was the only person I had. My family was gone at that point, so I relied on him for everything. He was manipulative from the start, but I was too naive to see it. When we started college, it was exciting that we were in the same classes, but then he slowly got more and more overbearing. He made me change my major to match his so our schedules could align. At one point, he even threatened to make me drop out of school because he didn’t like the way the TA looked at me. I was afraid to leave him because I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t know what else he’d do to me if I tried to leave him again. At first, he protected me from the world like my knight in shining armor, until he became the person I needed protection from—the villain in my own twisted fairytale.” I’m trying hard to calm my breathing, but my frustrations are spilling over. The pain in her soft voice makes me want to burn the world down to take away her suffering.
