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Every word had a taste to it. Bitter and ugly and it seeped into my bones. Because he knew somehow. My secret. The one I’d harbored since that day ten years before.
The Luke secret.
And though I wasn’t your normal teenage girl, I still had teenage girl fantasies. Like somehow Luke would see through everything and see me. And it would work.
But here it was, brutal, ugly, and heartbreaking evidence from the one man who would rather die than hurt me. But that’s what his words did, each of them little tiny slices in my fantasy, slices that were making my eyes water they were that painful.
He shook me a little, his eyes softening. “Tell me you get me, Roe.”
I stared at him. At the realization that the life that was meant to revolve around freedom from the prison of society was just another cage. One I would never escape because I loved my captors more than life.
“Yeah, Cade. I get you.”
Present Day
Things after Gage finally lowered his commandeered gun and organized chaos resumed—Gage punched Lucian in the nose, of course, and then the rest of the team had to restrain Lucian—were tense.
Gage’s exit was welcomed by everyone except me, especially Lucian.
He slammed the door of my tiny bedroom so hard, I swore the rickety hotel we were staying in shook. I reasoned anything more than a stiff breeze would likely cave in the roof, though the roof coming down on me wouldn’t exactly be the worst thing in the world right now.
“What the fuck was that, Rosie?” he yelled. “More accurately, who the fuck was that?”
I peeled the bottom of my shirt upward to discard the dirty and bloodstained tank on the floor. “An old friend, like I said,” I replied, not reacting to Lucian’s temper. He was somewhat of a hothead.
He snatched my wrist and wrenched me around to face him. “I need more information than an old friend,” he demanded. “Did you used to fuck?” His words, like Lucian himself, were harsh and uncouth.
He could be kind when he wanted to be, or when he needed to be, but he just wasn’t wired for proper human emotion. Which made him perfect for the job and perfect for me. You had to be a little—or more likely a lot—broken to survive this life. And even then it wasn’t a guarantee. In the six months I’d been here, I’d seen the worst of humanity I’d ever experienced. My thirty years living with an outlaw motorcycle club was nothing compared to this.
Sure, my family killed people. But not without cause. It was a twisted code, but it was underpinned by an equally twisted sense of humanity.
That didn’t exist here. Human life worked as a currency. It was a dangerous thing when death became a part of life, made it all too easy to pull the trigger. That should never be easy. No matter how many times you did it.
I’d already made peace with the demons I’d add to my collection from the two lives I’d ended today. It was when you stopped collecting demons that you transitioned into the real monster. I didn’t know whether I was looking forward to or dreading that.
Maybe I was already a monster.
I met Lucian’s empty eyes and laughed. “No, I haven’t fucked Gage. Like I said, he’s an old friend. That’s all I’m telling you, and that’s all you need to know. We don’t do personal, remember?”
He yanked me closer. “I sleep in your fuckin’ bed. That’s pretty personal.”
I didn’t flinch. “No. We fuck. Both for our own reasons that have nothing to do with each other. I’d say that’s the furthest from personal you can get. And the second it becomes different for you, you can sleep somewhere else.”
I wrenched my hands from his grasp to step toward my sleep aid—a half-full whisky bottle. The murky liquid sloshed into the chipped glass sitting on the table beside my bed. I downed the liquid quickly so I couldn’t taste how warm and shitty it was. Once I swallowed, I turned to eye Lucian, who was still glaring at me. “You touch or talk to me like that again, I’ll put my knife through your temple,” I promised, slamming the bathroom door shut.
It wasn’t empty either.
None of my threats were. Not anymore.
Killing was like tattoos: done once, it’s painful and scary, but afterward it’s almost addicting. The scars of it lasted the same amount of time as tattoos too. In other words, forever.
Just like heartbreak.
I couldn’t figure out if it’d started or ended that day in the halls of Amber High fifteen years back. And here, in the middle of Venezuela, in the middle of an argument with another man, in the middle of an escape from these very memories, they came back to me, the halls as vivid and stark as they were had it happened yesterday.
